2026-06-24 · paper-digest
Zeytuncu: Puzzle Difficulty Comes Down to How Many Numbers You Use — Fukai Reads
A difficulty-modeling paper by Yunus E. Zeytuncu on integer arithmetic puzzles (Countdown-style number games). Using an exact solver to generate over 3.4 million instances and defining difficulty by minimum operation count, it shows that the number of inputs used in a minimal solution alone is a 'minimal sufficient statistic' that perfectly determines difficulty.