How are the polyform puzzles solved?
Polyform Puzzler works by reducing puzzles into “exact cover” problems. Briefly, to solve an exact cover problem, given a matrix of 0s and 1s, we must find a set of rows which, when combined, contain exactly one 1 in each column. To find every solution we must find all such sets of rows. We construct a two-dimensional matrix with named columns. The column names consist of the puzzle piece names, then the coordinates of the solution space.
