I woke up this morning thinking about using a genetic evolution kind of algorithm instead to evolve puzzles of a desired difficulty.

Seems much easier to get moving with that since breeding can be as simple as swapping sections of a string of digits.

@El'endiaStarman that's basically what I do already. There's a fitness function, I'm optimizing via a random walk, etc. That's not to say that you shouldn't also try something like that, it's unlikely you'd wind up duplicating what I've done by accident

Yeah. And I'll be writing the solver on its own (in Python), so the puzzle generation bit can be whatever.

okay. I'll give you the XML specs for the .puz files when you're ready, or whatever helps

I can copy what I see for now.

drive.google.com/open?id=1uHsWrqvf4YfoG8xs7m0v3WwI9B2PpsT0 is the input code

That's what parses and renders a .puz file?

I mean, it references other stuff in the codebase, but it has all the tags

Great, thanks!

you're welcome