This article was just a great deal of fun to write. I wanted to talk about Knuth’s DLX algorithm (“Dancing Links”) as a solution to the exact cover problem. I’d already talked about Sudoku (a great demo of DLX) recently as an article in the mag, so there was nothing for it but to go for pentominoes, one of the other examples Knuth gave. And it gave me a great reason to bring out my old pentomino set that I was given as a teenager and futz around with it. Needless to say I’m still just as bad at solving it as I was then. […]
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