Nam Puzzle

Play here

Few weeks ago I read an article in The Guardian titled Nam Puzzle, at first it looked like Sudoku but its an algebraic equation twisted like a snake. Objective of this puzzle is simple, there are nine empty cells, fill the empty cells with numbers from 1 to 9 and no number can repeat itself.

It took some time to figure out the equation and was not patient enough to solve the problem by hand, itertools. permutations in Python did the trick. There are 2672 solutions to that puzzle

import itertools

  
def nam_solver(nums):
  if (nums[0] + (13*nums[1]/nums[2]) + nums[3] + 12*nums[4] - nums[5] - 11 + (nums[6]*nums[7]/nums[8]) - 10 == 66):
    print nums
	
if __name__ == '__main__':
  for nums in itertools.permutations(xrange(1,10), 9):
    nam_solver(nums)
		

I was really obsessed with the puzzle wanted to build the game as-is in pure Javascript.

Designing the board

This is first step, drew 6 by 7 grid in PowerPoint and labeled each cell as per the image provided by the Guardian. Managed to create a dynamic html table at runtime by calling document.createElement. Later labeled each cell, took care of css, applied color to separate the usercells, operator and static numbers

Designing user cell

Now that I had an actual board game the next step is accepting user input.For this, created a dynamic form with single input type text inside each of nine user cells. Developed regex to accept single digit between 1 through 9 and validated user input onkeypress

Checking solution

To check solution with user inputs converted user inputs to an array and compared it with this [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], This check helped to figure if any user cell is empty or if user repeated the input twice. The final equation is straight forward as shown below nums[0] + (13*nums[1]/nums[2]) + nums[3] + 12*nums[4] - nums[5] - 11 + (nums[6]*nums[7]/nums[8]) - 10 == 66

imgs validation

Hosting

I did not realize we can host static website on Amazon-S3, created folder, copied all files and made them public, viola site's live! Play here

It took four weeks to develop (on/off) and its very close to one published in the article. It was fun to develop it.