“What runs here is a plain-JavaScript port of a native C++ optimal solver I wrote.”

Seems to be AI in the older sense from 10 years ago?

Terms like AI used to mean something specific

While impressive that the optimal can be proven, I feel like the example puzzles here aren't ones that are particularly hard to find solutions for (when move count doesnt matter). I'd be interested to see at least one example that has a lot of tricky dead states that would act as traps.

Intuitively, I feel like the final board might also be able to be tackled in browser, if you use WASM and speed up the solver.

I wonder: maybe the state is overly compressed? Could it speed things up to store (boxes, [every position the keeper can reach without pushing]) rather than (boxes, representative keeper position), so we can reduce recomputation of the player walking around?

I wonder: maybe A* is counterproductive, as obvious heuristics have traps? Maybe BFS is better?

I wonder: the search doesn't actually "skip over" walking states, it just hides them in the processing of each element in the queue, so adding them to the queue might actually be faster?

I wonder: are there any additional cool state pruning techniques out there?

Many interesting questions... sadly, the webpage is written by AI, so there's zero discussion of these tradeoffs, future avenues, or rejected ideas, in favor of meaningless, self-congratulatory copy about the "provable optimum" and silly claims like a bucket queue being allocation-free.

Compared to original sokoban game, the player's final position does not matter, and the number of boxes is strictly equal to the number of goal marks.

Fun game! Solver seems really smart. It would be great to disable double tap to zoom or make it slightly more adapted to phone screen sizes