Samon превращает узор на песке в проверяемую головоломкуSamon turns patterns in sand into a puzzle with checkable answers

A monk enters a sand garden and must rake his footprints away on the way out, visiting every free cell exactly once along an unbroken route. That rule becomes Samon, a design document and playable browser prototype published on Gwern's website. The page develops a 2023 sketch; its current date range extends to October 5, 2026, and its status remains work in progress. This is an available prototype, rather than a finished commercial release.

Simply filling the board with a winding path sounds easy. The author tested that intuition with a solver: an empty 7×7 garden with a corner gate has 1,510,446 valid routes. Random stones did not automatically create satisfying puzzles. They often made gardens either impossible or excessively open. Mathematical checking helps distinguish a rule that sounds engaging from a constraint that actually demands thought. The design account gives readers both the proposed experience and the measurements used to examine it.

One solution is to count turns. A solver establishes the minimum, called par, and completing a garden at that score earns a seal. For the same empty 7×7 board, par is 12 turns, achieved by 66 routes. Another rule uses a wide rake: no U-turn on open sand without bracing against a stone or wall. Physical imagery becomes part of the puzzle. The author nevertheless warns that fewer turns do not guarantee an attractive pattern under every arrangement of obstacles.

The hints are particularly interesting. They examine the player's existing route: can it still reach par, can it at least finish, or should the player step back? If a search cannot establish an answer within its budget, it should acknowledge uncertainty. Helped optimal solutions receive a grey seal; unaided ones receive vermilion. Routes and progress can travel in links. Accepting another player's progress requires an explicit action, while viewing a shared solution does not record it as your own achievement.

The prototype includes 148 gardens, a daily garden and an unrestricted raking practice area. Completing a garden reveals a classical Japanese poem with a source for the original. Keyboard controls and reduced-motion preferences are supported; the author still proposes testing fully nonvisual accessibility with relevant users. The document, original code and design are released under CC0. That allows others to study the implementation and develop the ideas, without implying that every check in the production plan has been completed.

Why it matters

Our reading is that a legible aesthetic objective can become a measurable challenge without an opaque judge. Players can count the turns and explain where an unnecessary one occurred. A proven optimum and an enjoyable experience still require different kinds of evidence. The production plan retains testing on real phones and observation of players, to establish whether they learn the rule rather than merely copying a demonstrated path.