Reminds me of a very fascinating paper
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/dancing-color.ps.gz

(Note that the paper discusses puzzles where pieces may have one out
of a limited number of "shapes" resulting from all permitted
positions. I guess that's similar to what OP described.)

-W


On 22/02/2013, Michiel Vermandel <mvermand@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well,
>
> I need to solve - let's say - a complex 2 dimensional puzzle.
> The goal is to fill a 2D rectangle (with fixed dimensions) out of "puzzle
> pieces" that do not have a fixed shape.
> A puzzle piece is built out of a number of bars of variable length and the
> bars can slide against each other (to some extend: differs per joint of two
> bars).
>
>
> Just shifting and swapping around the "puzzle pieces" is not quite well
> performingsince that will result in many
>
> violations although a shift or swap could match perfectly if you slide (some
> of) the bars of the piece at the same time.
>
> Feeding all possible combinations of shifts and swaps combined with all
> possible forms of the pieces would result in ... well quite a lot of
> combinations.
> So I want to build a smarter mover that "knows" how to slide a piece in
> order to fit it in an available place (or swap it with an other piece to
> improve both pieces match).
> I think the mover would perform far better if I have a "bit-map" that
> contains the 2D representation of the way everything is placed and which
> could calculate the best layout of the piece before putting it into the
> puzzle.
>
> Therefor I would like to know the last change applied so I can incrementally
> update the bit-map instead of recalculating it entirely every time.
>
> Hey, hmmm... maybe I don't need to know the last accepted move. Just finding
> the diff between best-solution and previous best-solution might do the
> trick?!
>
> For finding the best layout of a single piece, ?could I use a second
> instance of planner that does a "normal" bin-packaging of a single piece in
> the available container (container is then an available free area or the
> combination of one or more other pieces and the free space around that other
> piece)?
>
> Maybe I'm going goofy on this... too many long nights are beginning to cloud
> my mind.
>
> Well, any ideas are welcome.
>
>
> Regards.
>
>
> -----------------
> http://www.codessentials.com - Your essential software, for free!
> Follow us at http://twitter.com/#!/Codessentials
>
>
> ________________________________
>  From: Geoffrey De Smet <ge0ffrey.spam@gmail.com>
> To: rules-users@lists.jboss.org
> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 10:37 AM
> Subject: Re: [rules-users] Planner: Is it possible to know which move was
> selected on step-end?
>
>
> Officially, in the public api (aka the "user facing api"), there's no such
> listener.
> Why would you need this at runtime?
> Open an issue: if there's a good reason to need this, we can talk
>    about adding it to the public api.
>  https://issues.jboss.org/browse/PLANNER
>
>
> That being said and handled first, the benchmarker actually hacks a
>    step listener if I recall correctly:
> https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools-planner/tree/master/drools-planner-benchmark/src/main/java/org/drools/planner/benchmark/core/statistic/calculatecount
>
>
> Op 20-02-13 21:56, Michiel Vermandel schreef:
>
> Hi,
>>
>>
>>Is it possible to capture which move was selected on step-end?
>>I don't mean in the logging but by event or custom selector or... ?
>>
>>
>>
>>Thanks
>>
>>
>>Michiel
>>
>>
>>-----------------
>>http://www.codessentials.com - Your essential software, for
>          free!
>>Follow us at http://twitter.com/#!/Codessentials
>>
>>
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