v0.2.0

Breaking changes:

• The required minimum Julia version is now 1.10.

• Changed some of the arguments of the Eternity2Puzzle type constructor; the argument to specify the piece definitions is now a positional argument and to load a puzzle board from a file, the load! function must be used. See the docstring of Eternity2Puzzle for more details and examples.

• The initialize_pieces function has been removed. You can now use the Eternity2Puzzle constructor without arguments to create a puzzle with the original Eternity II pieces.

• The generate_pieces function has been removed. Instead, the Eternity2Puzzle constructor can be used directly to create a puzzle instance with randomly generated pieces for a given board size. The number of frame and inner colors can be adjusted with the frame_colors and inner_colors keyword arguments. The puzzle board is automatically filled with a valid piece configuration for a full solution and you can use the reset! function to clear the board.

• Renamed the included solvers BacktrackingSearch to E2BacktrackingSearch and BacktrackingSearchRecursive to SimpleBacktrackingSearch (using a loop instead of recursive function calls now).

• Changed the numbering convention for the color patterns and the edge order in input files. This change should not affect solver algorithms, but the visualization for puzzles from custom input files may be different now.

New features and improvements:

• Added the ability to play the smaller 6x6 Clue Puzzle 1 with play(:clue1) and the 6x12 Clue Puzzles 2 and 4 with play(:clue2) or play(:clue4). These puzzles can be solved by hand. More general, you can now play any given puzzle with a board size of either 16x16, 6x6, or 6x12 via play(puzzle::Eternity2Puzzle).

• Added a new estimate_solutions function to estimate the number of valid solutions for any given Eternity2Puzzle.

• An Eternity2Puzzle can now be created with more puzzle pieces than are necessary to fill the entire board. This allows, for example, to solve a smaller sized board using only a subset of the original Eternity II pieces.

• Added support for the preview function to render puzzles that use more than the 22 standard color patterns. In this case the patterns are replaced by plain colors.

• Added the ability to display an Eternity2Puzzle in form of an image directly in the REPL. This only works for terminals with Sixel graphics support. To enable this feature, install the ImageInTerminal.jl package and load it in your REPL session via using ImageInTerminal. You can toggle between text output and image rendering with the ImageInTerminal.disable_encoding() and
  ImageInTerminal.enable_encoding() functions.