Creating Solvable Instances for Unsolved Puzzles

Procedural grid-world puzzle generation is a fairly well- studied field with applications both in machine learning as well as more directly in game development. Most of these efforts are focused either on Generate-and-test method- ologies, requiring solvers, or rely on specific mathematical properties of their games. Kwirk is a 1989 block-pushing puzzle game [3] that does not have a solver1, and while while bearing a striking re- semblance to Sokoban [4], a 1982 puzzle game that has seen a lot more research in the domain of level generation, Kwirk violates the properties that the generative meth- ods researched for Sokoban rely on. In this paper we will discuss how we adapted one of these Sokoban generation algorithms to function on Kwirk regardless.