Hexcells Infinite Solver

Hexcells Infinite Solver has had an update to fix some optical character recognition (OCR) issues.

Opus 5.5 created a script that would go through all possible Puzzle Generator puzzles. It originally estimated a minimum of 95 years to go through all 100,000,000 of them. The script ran overnight, and it had an OCR problem with puzzle #00000084.

After a short discussion with Opus 5.5, a solution was implemented. The script would pre-generate sets of hexes of various sizes with varying constraints in them, then use those sets to help detect the hexes and constraints in the puzzle. Hex sizes from 50 pixels to 170 pixels were generated. If the script encountered a size outside that range, it would add more hexes to the pre-made set.

The result was successful in passing the blocked puzzle, and it solved the first 441 puzzles over a couple of nights. It averaged 1 minute per puzzle in the last run. That's roughly 190 years for my laptop running 24/7.