Just to not feed the witch hunt further, note that human 30 second solve times can be entirely possible for the easiest puzzles, with enough experience, practice, and a bit of risk-taking; see e.g. https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/1 part 1. But the 4 second solution times we saw last year are not, no matter how you look at it.
But yes, you would have people openly share repositories for automatically ingesting the puzzle text, solving the puzzles, and submitting the results the moment the puzzles opened, leading to inhuman solution times. So, despite the rules stating that you can't do that, the result is that whenever the puzzles were easy enough for an LLM to solve them with high probability – and most of them are – the leaderboards would be overrun with such solutions.
In 2023, the LLMs would still struggle enough that the overall leaderboard (taking all 25 ⋅ 2 puzzles into account) would still be dominated by ordinary people (many of them recording their solutions), in 2024 that was no longer the case. Personally I would go from being able to top 100 regularly, to almost never being able to. I'm going to miss the thrill, and think it's a bit saddening that we can't have nice things, but also ultimately think that getting rid of it is the best option.
I don't understand why this is "hard". Doesn't a donut have this coveted property? I can't think of a way to drill a hole in a donut that would allow a donut through.
Hm, yeah, tested it down to about 500 px width, and the low-resolution devices in Chromium but that was too optimistic then. The modals should of course be closeable, and both game boards simultaneously visible. Played around with the modals a bit, so maybe it works better now?
Yeah, the problem is in a sense solved asymptotically by the optimal construction in https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0302002, but that one tends to lead to long solutions in practice, so there's plenty of room to try to come up with solutions that give shorter solutions for concrete instances.
That's nifty! There's a lot of symmetry that can help to boil it down. For example, you actually only need row moves, and any solution with column moves can canonically be turned into one with row moves; post-composing with Ci→j is pre-composing with Rj→i.
One can think of the set of all possible board configurations as the vertices as a graph, with edges indicating how to move between configurations. Then your 1536 solutions are the 1536 distinct shortest paths between the starting and target configuration.
Then, you can also choose to consider not just board configurations, but board configurations up to simultaneous permutation of rows and columns; that will also reduce the number of unique solutions.
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