This README file is under development.
The Futoshiki project seeks to implement a graphical user interface (GUI) for creating and solving Futoshiki puzzles, Sudoku-like puzzles described and featured in Gareth Moore's (2012) puzzle book as as combining "the row and column restraints [sic] of Sudoku with arrows that indicate the smallest number of certain pairs."
Some typical Futoshiki puzzles as presented in Moore's (2012) puzzle book look like this:
That image above shows a scanned image of pg 24 with 4 different, unsolved 7 x 7 puzzles. The goal is to fill the remaining squares so that (for 7 x 7 puzzles) each number 1–7 appears exactly once in each row and in each column, plus every pair of numbers separated by the < or > symbols must obey the corresponding less than/greater than relationship.
The first (handwritten) steps in solving Puzzle 89 are shown in the figure below. One of the very first steps was placing the 7 in the 6th column: that cell must have an integer 1, 2, ..., 7 that is greater than 6, and thus 7 was the only choice. Other cells show some smaller, handwritten "mark-up" notation to indicate that the possibilities have been narrowed down to some useful subset of the possible values 1, 2, ..., 7.
[When complete,] the project can be run directly from the latest .jar file ..., which can be downloaded and opened directly on your local system. The project could also be run from inside IntelliJ IDEA, with the main access point being the Main() class, but this will require of course the appropriate installation of and access to the JavaFX library.
PLANNED
Stage 1: User can enter a set of "given" cell values and <, > comparators, "lock them in" (given values then appearing in bold, for example), then solve the puzzle.
Stage 2: As in Stage 1, and program will verify that any eventual solution entered is valid.
Stage 3: As in Stage 2, and program will initially verify that the proposed puzzle is valid at the "lock-in" stage.
Stage 4: Program will be able to generate puzzles of varying size and difficulty level. This will require work on both an algorithm for generating valid puzzles (i.e. a puzzle with a unique solution) and a system for rating the difficulty level.
The project includes ....
The program is written in Java, using JavaFX and IntelliJ IDEA.
Authors:
Warren D. Craft (wdc)
Tyler H. Fenske (thf)
Some acknowledgments here.
Sat 06/01/2019 Established an initial local and remote repository, including this README document. Texted briefly with Tyler (thf) and added him as collaborator on GitHub.
Sun 06/02/2019 Experimented with JavaFX TextFields to produce an user-editable text field that can be constrained to specific integer values. Managed to create a TextField constrained to empty string or single-digit integers from 1 to n, centered in the text box. Next step will be to encapsulate the effect into a separate class extending the TextField class and taking as arguments a value for the maximum int n.
The general design is shown in the instance diagram included in the /doc directory.
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Some immediate next steps in development would include:
(1) ....
(2) ....
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