kaleidoscope puzzle

i used to play this puzzle as a kid and i wanted to write a solver

this project takes another cool approach, but it is only implemented for red and black puzzles

i scraped some of the boards from Mike's Kaleidoscope Classic Page (page 1 and page 2) using beautifulsoup and opencv

Demo

play online version here

JS-based frontend (left) and terminal-based solver (right). In the solution, each grouping of the same letter represents on piece. The solver currently uses naiive backtracking and is fast on most boards. However, there is still a lot of room for optimization :)

Running

this is under construction and probably won't work right now (8.29.23)

to run the frontend

npm run dev

to run the solver

cargo run -- --name australian-emu