coloin wrote:I can see a case that the max expand puzzle might be less complex than some of its inherent lesser puzzles
If you are able to process all the minimals..then that would obviously be more complete !
By definition of a max-expand (or T&E(3)-expand in my more precise vocabulary), it is still in T&E(3).
It can certainly be less complex, in many senses: fewer guardians for the tridagon, maybe simpler resolution after the tridagon rules have been used.
coloin wrote:I like the idea that you can generate Bxb6 puzzles form a TE3 by adding a clue. All minimal puzzles which have the new clue will be BxB6
Finding Bxb>6 was only possible by minimizing an expanded BxB6 and very very rarely a higher order minimal puzzle was found.
That's the whole idea: starting from known harder puzzles, because the chances of finding hard puzzles by vicinity search from less hard ones are very low.
When you're on the T&E(3)-T&E(2) border, on the T&E(3) side, i.e. when you have a T&E(3)-expand puzzle, if you add a single clue (1-expansion), then you can get (non-minimal) puzzles in any of T&E(0, 1, 2). Most of them are not interesting. But you can get a few with high B or BxB classifications - and still harder ones by minimisation.
I've done this on a small scale in [HCCS2], but the scripts Im' writing will allow anyone to do it on a larger scale.
coloin wrote:Grouping the puzzles by grid solution is handled very ably and reliably with gridchecker, it also removes redundant clues, handling big files super fast.
I've already lost too much time trying to compile on my Mac a program that is based on obscure x86 code and restricted to specific variants of Unix.
I wrote CLIPS functions to do that. However slow it is, it works on my Mac and it costs me only little time to program. I let one core run this in the background.
In my view, this is only preparatory work for an approach that will by based on totally separate processes for different solution grids.
However, if you can do that easily and reliably on your PC with gridchecker, I'm interested. That would free one processor of my Mac.
(BTW, the work you have done on mith's collection, cleaning the minimals and the solution grids, has already been very helpful. In the night, I got my first batch of minimals for each of the first 1000 solutions and I can start applying my (still partial) scripts to it.)
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