250 Enigma Variations

It's been 11 months since I started up the Enigmatic Code site — a place to share programmatic solutions to New Scientist's Enigma puzzles — and I've just posted the 250th Enigma Puzzle to the Enigmatic Code site. This means there is the best part of 5 years worth of puzzles there, along with my own solutions to them.

I've got all puzzles from 2012 (to date), 2011, 2010 and 2009 and most of 2008, as well as some puzzles from the very start of Enigma in 1979 (thanks to Google Books) along with a handful of other dates that I've come across.

And so to celebrate the 250th puzzle going up I've posted the oldest not-yet published puzzle I've been able to find — Enigma 12: Cubic Walks — which after pondering over a Rubik's Cube for some time I came up with a sort of solution to in Python, although I'm not entirely happy with it. But it makes the list of Notable Enigmas, which is my personal view of the 20 most thought provoking Enigma Puzzles I've posted. (Also on that page are a handful of Enigmas that I've not been able to come up with a satisfactory programmatic solution for).

I will keep on posting new Enigma Puzzles as they are published in New Scientist, (they usually go up on a Wednesday evening in the UK) and I'm filling out the gaps with puzzles that I already have solved. I have programs going back continuously to Enigma 1482, when I started using them as a weekly programming challenge. Up until Enigma 1554 I was using Perl, but then I switched to Python and I've been using Python since. Sometimes I publish my original Perl code, but usually now I just write a Python solution rather than clean up my Perl code ready for posting.

Once the puzzles I've already solved are posted I'll start working through Google Books and put up older puzzles.

If you're a fellow Programmatic Enigmatist feel free to add comments to the Enigmatic Code site.