Future Plans

Read this chapter as a list of possible projects that you could do or a list of design ideas that I'd like to implement in BURRTOOLS. This is not a list of functionality that I will do, but that I'd like to have.

So, what are our future plans? There are a lot of things still missing (or in need of improvements) from the current program. A list of things that might be interesting to implement are the following:

• Add some special algorithms that are faster for certain kind of puzzles. The current algorithm is quite good for nearly all puzzles, but it's not the fastest.
• Add more colour constraint possibilities, e.g. edge matching, ...
• Add more different space grids, add parameters to some grids (lengths and angles).
• Add rotation checks to the disassembler.
• Add a shape generator: create all piece shapes that fulfil certain rules (shape, colours, union of two shapes, ...)
• Libraries of shapes to import pieces from.
• Add tools for puzzle design (see below).
• Make it possible to divide problems so that they can be solved in parallel on several computers and then the solutions are back together in one file.
• Improve multi-threading so that multi-core CPUs are better used.
• Better tool for colourization of a piece. E.g. checkering, but it needs to be more general than just checkering.
• Create a debug window to make it possible to find out why there is no assembly or why an assembly can not be taken apart.
• Speed improvements.
• ''Unificator'' a tool that makes it easy to check the results of adding colour constraints. For example: suppose you have designed a puzzle with one interesting solution and many uninteresting ones and you want now, by adding colour constrains, make that one solution unique. It can be a labour intensive task to do that. The unificator would help here by quickly showing the results of adding colour here or making a piece that colour, ...
• exploded view

We would be very happy to get contributions from other people. After all there are quite a few people out there that have their own puzzle solving programs, maybe they have some nice additions. There is one important thing to keep in mind: the additions have to run on LINUX. So you can not use any proprietary library that is not available for LINUX.