It was exactly one year ago I launched The Puzzle Machine which, at the time, I thought was a brilliant idea. It was a blog pre-populated with three new Sudoku puzzles, a Cryptogram, and answers to the previous day’s puzzles for every day of the year.

Its main visitors were the MSN searchbot, my sister Barbara, and the underbelly of the Comment Spam protazoa that are engulfing the net as we speak. That last one surprised me, because I shut off comments to the site at about week three, since I hadn’t, at that time, found a good anti-spam program. But the stuff just kept accumulating in between sporadic administrative efforts to throw it all away, offering a bizarre range of products, services, and diversions that has left me utterly convinced that I am the only marginally normal person on the planet. That, or that the definition of ‘normal’ is far wider than I had been led to believe.

Yeah, well.

Since starting the Puzzle Machine blog, I’ve provided Sudoku Solver scripts to groups in Australia and in France working on what one can only hope will be more interesting and successful puzzle sites. I’m also sitting on a gigantic cache of Sudoku puzzles just waiting for publication. If any of you know Will Shortz, tell him I’m entertaining any reasonable offer.

This always happens.

A Google of ‘Raging Rapids’ turned up this excellent page.

It indicates that I was overconfident with my perl script … turns out there IS a way to fit the rafters such that everyone if facing the back. The writer pointed out something I had not considered: symmetric pieces that could work in either regular or flipped position, which is a case I did not account for.

So okay, nobody’s perfect. The script has been repaired, and the results updated!

I’ve added a write-up for the ‘Raging Rapids’ puzzle by ThinkFun. A reader mentioned it in an email comment to the Scramble Squares Solver … he had knocked over a friend’s board and needed to get it solved pronto. It was a good insight … Raging Rapids is in many ways a simpler puzzle than Scramble Squares, but a close cousin. The depth-first algorithm is easily modified to provide the ‘correct’ solution, and can be adapted to explore for some novel ones as well.