Run Survo Solver inside browser using Web workers

In 2007 I started this blog with post Solving small puzzles (with just a few lines of code). Years later I noticed that there was actually comment at the blog post asking for the code of the app. Unfortunately, I’ve trashed that code so couldn’t get that back anymore. But I decided to implement it again and decided to add some extra flavor to it .

So I went and implemented survo solver using TypeScript + Javascript and Web workers which means that you can run it directly in your browser (actually I implemented this over a year ago but forgot to publish the blog post).

You can try the solver in here and check the source from here. Solver user interface looks like this:

In order to have lots of puzzles for my solvers I created puzzles.json data file. That file contains puzzles from https://www.survo.fi/puzzles/ and that local data file is used by the web worker solvers.

Hopefully this demo app gave you few ideas to think about. First: If you can run this kind of processing in browser (without any software installations) then what kind of things you can actually use this? Second: Browser performance is improving a lot as we speak and things like WebAssembly are also coming in the future. These two things in mind you can start building you own "distributed processing apps" . Maybe even apps like SETI@home running directly in the browser! And that would be pretty cool.

Anyways… Happy hacking!