I occasionally encounter problems akin to logic grid puzzles in programming challenges or other contexts. I usually approach them through some ad hoc backtracking algorithm. Recently I decided to try and develop a systematic approach for solving such problems without reinventing the wheel each time.

These puzzles fall into the …

I had fun solving the second part of Day 24 of Advent of Code this year. This was a more mathematical problem than most, and by working with vectors and matrices it can be solved with minimal faffing about at the component level.

We are given a set of initial …