The Puzzle Processor Project: Towards an Implementation

The Puzzle Processor Project seeks to develop a special-purpose processor for efficiently solving a certain kind of puzzles. The puzzles are packing problems where a collection of pieces and a box are given with the goal to fit the pieces into the box. Packing problems appear both in recreational and in more serious settings, such as scheduling.
First, we reformulate these packing problems in terms of set partitioning. Next, we derive an instruction set for the puzzle processor by transforming a backtrack program for set partitioning. Finally, we present and analyze a design for the puzzle processor expressed in Tangram, a VLSI-programming language developed at Philips Research
Laboratories.