Calculords Solver

Simple scripts to calculate optimal plays for the game Calculords

There are two different solvers here:

exhaustive.py will check all possible combinations, exiting only when a perfect solution (no remaining inputs or targets) is found or all options have been tried.

sampling.py will run 100,000 randomly selected combinations and return the best one found.

Rather than calculate all the possible play permutations, the script plays randomly a given number of times and then returns the best result found.

Only the sampling solver is currently invoked by the supplied runner, as experimentation has found it to be "good enough" and there's not much difference between running the sampler and running a fraction of the exhaustive solver's possibilities.

Usage

Run calculords.py inputs target [target...] were inputs is a concatenated string of all input numbers (e.g. 56429838) and the target card values are simply separated by spaces. Then play the actions. Repeat until enemy base is captured :)

Unsolvable cases:

For reference, the following cases failed to clear completely via either solver (there are many others of course, but these have been used for validation.)

The difference between solvers is readily apparent here: while the sampling solver will return in relatively constant time (around 5s on a MacBook Air,) the exhaustive solver will take 9.5 minutes to come to the same conclusion (timings found while using the solver directly without multiprocessing.)

• inputs = [6,1,8,4,3,4,7,3], targets = [20,100,62]
• inputs = [8,1,5,4,8,4,7,7], targets = [58,10,27]
• inputs = [4,8,4,9,7,3,3,6], targets = [28,35,63]