Kitsune is a software to solve digit problems of the famous french television game show "Des chiffres et des lettres" or its british version "Countdown". Kitsune enables you to solve a problem of your choice (TV mode), train yourself with random problems (challenge mode), or with problems stored in files (training mode).
There are three different ways of playing with Kitsune, called "game modes": the challenge mode (default), the TV mode and the training mode. You can select the mode with the menu "Game mode", or by clicking on the mode icon in the bottom middle of the interface.
The challenge mode is the default mode of Kitsune. When you click on "Play", Kitsune chooses a random problem, and you have to solve it in the given time. A bar indicates the remaining thinking time. Kitsune will remember your numbers of wins and losses. If you don't find the solution, just click on "Solve" to display it.
An interesting option of Kitsune is that you can set the number of tiles (with the "Tiles" menu). By decreasing the number of tiles, you can try first easier problems than the real ones, and adapt the game difficulty to your current strength. In the same menu, you can also choose the set of authorized tiles. You may find fun to add for example an "11" or a "13" in the set of tiles.
Kitsune records your score in the challenge mode, and displays the total number of wins and losses in the middle of the interface. If you click on the score results, a little box will appear, indicating since when the results are recorded, and allowing you to reset the score.
The TV mode enables you to enter your own chosen problem. It can be useful for example to check the solution of problems seen on TV, and it's why we call it TV mode. You can change the tiles value with the mouse wheel, or with left or right click. After having chosen the target and the tiles, just click on "Solve" to compute the solutions, or "Play" if you want to try and solve the problem yourself, as in the challenge mode. Note that in the TV mode, even if you win or lose, your score remains unchanged.
In the training mode, you can choose a file on the disk containing a list of problems, and try to solve them. We designed this mode because problems invented by humans can be more interesting than random problems. A fair lot of settings are available in Kitsune file format, and the fun of the training mode depends mainly on the imagination of the file's author. Once you have selected a file on the disk, Kitsune will display them in the interface, and you have to solve each problem in the given time. After the list is completed, Kitsune displays your results. You can find files for the training mode on our web site.
The default rules used by Kitsune are:
For a given problem, Kitsune computes all the "best solutions": if the target is reachable, these are all the ways to reach it. If it is not reachable, these are the best approximations. Kitsune displays first the solutions which use less tiles.
Kitsune does its best to display only a minimal set of different solutions: for example, we don't need to display both 6×100 and 100×6, so Kitsune simplifies the output, and displays only one of these two solutions.
It is possible to activate or desactivate some simplifications in the "Options" menu.
The files used in the training mode are XML files, with a title tag and a list of problem tags. The title tag, named "Kitsune", has the following attributes (* indicates optional ones):
A problem tag, named "problem" has the following attributes :
There is no editor for the kitsune files in the 3.0 version. They have to be created directly with a text editor.