I came to the conclusion that in any _decent_ puzzle there is unlikely to be an analytic short-cut that lets you create the puzzles. I've written a maths/maze g

I came to the conclusion that in any _decent_ puzzle there is unlikely to be an analytic short-cut that lets you create the puzzles. I've written a maths/maze game called Numplussed and wrote a level generator for it that was essentially random puzzle + brute force with a few optimisations. The level generator means that game has over 300,000 levels. http://numplussed.com http://numplussed.com (free on iOS and Android) The random+brute force approach turned out to be very interesting - the algorithm came up with puzzles that I never would have thought of if I was hand-crafting the levels. Or, say, if I had written a level generator with a specific sort of problem/solution in mind. e.g. here's one of the hard levels that got generated: http://imgur.com/bqIvDCw http://imgur.com/bqIvDCw . See here for the rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D0i2Ce9Ujo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D0i2Ce9Ujo