🧩 sgt-puzzles-solvers

A collection of Drools-based solver implementations for selected puzzles from Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection.

Overview

This repository provides automated solutions for various logic puzzles originally developed by Simon Tatham. It integrates the puzzle back-ends with Drools, enabling rule‑based solving and flexible strategy definition.

🧰 Features

• Solver modules for individual puzzles (currently only Loopy).
• Core engine using Drools rules and declarative logic.
• Modular architecture allowing easy addition of new puzzle types.

🚀 Getting Started

🛑 Prerequisites

• Java JDK 17+
• Apache Maven
• Drools Framework

🛠️ Building

git clone https://github.com/DidierLoiseau/sgt-puzzles-solvers.git
cd sgt-puzzles-solvers
mvn clean verify

⚙️ Usage

Currently, only Loopy is supported. Just run com.github.sgtpuzzles.solvers.Solver with the path to a save file as argument.

It will output to a corresponding .solved file that you can then open with the original game. Since it records each move, you can then play with undo/redo to see the deductions.

💡 Why Drools?

I just wanted to learn about it! 🤓 I was playing with Loopy at the time, and thought it would be a nice challenge.

Drools offers a powerful, declarative rule language that lets you articulate logical inferences like “if X is true and Y is true, assert Z”. This also makes it a natural fit for expressing puzzle-solving logic.

📄 References

• Simon Tatham’s original puzzle source collections (chiark.greenend.org.uk)
• Chris Boyle’s port to Android (chris.boyle.name, github) – the port I was playing, and a convenient way to understand how save files are created

👷 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please consider:

• Writing clean, well-documented .drl rules.
• Adding unit tests for new puzzles.
• Submitting issues with reproducible puzzle instances.
• Discussing high-level solver architecture in issues or pull requests.