@Perdita:

Who’s pleasure am I spoiling, exactly? Jigsaw lovers? Nobody is being forced to use my techniques to solve jigsaw puzzles, and people who enjoy jigsaws for jigsaws-sake are free to carry on solving jigsaws exactly as they always have.

I’m aware that Jigidi has scoreboards, and I take special care not to pollute them with machine-assisted results (by, for example, not logging in to a Jigidi account), so jigsaw enthusiasts are unlikely to even find out that it’s possible to have the computer help you in this way unless they go looking for it. Incidentally, I’m not the first person to solve online jigsaws this way and I doubt I’ll be the last.

If you don’t know me well it’s possible that you don’t realise that this is, mostly, for my pleasure. Two things I really enjoy are (a) using satellite networks to find lost tupperware (geocahing) and (b) using computers to in unusual ways to solve interesting problems (hacking). Even if it weren’t for geocaching, coming up with ways to have a computer solve Jigidi jigsaws is the kind of thing I enjoy doing. When I first came across Sudodu, I solved a couple of puzzles and then thought “hey, what would be more fun would be writing and optimising a computer program to solve them”, so I did. When a friend shared with me a logic puzzle about combination locks, I solved it, then wrote a program that could solve the general case of “puzzles of that type” (even though I only knew of the one!), then I wrote a program that could generate programs of that type, then I made a game out of it, widening the reach of that kind of puzzle and giving the world a new game to enjoy.

(Incidentally, I don’t care how people solve the puzzles in my game: they can do it by hand, or they can use a solver like the one I produced, or they can write their own solver, or they can read the source code and get the answers rightaway. Like jigsaws, my lock puzzles are a single-player game, so people are welcome to solve them in whichever way is most-fun for them.)