Only moves can be used to make this vine have the best score possible. Longest possible vine will hit the bottom left corner of the board.

Here’s some suggestions for mini-contests:

-Best solver that always starts the vine at square 1
-Best solver that follows in the tradition of a ‘normal’ 15 square in that there ends up being only 1 empty square
-Best solver that always uses the full limit of moves
-Solver that has the most creative ‘artistic’ vine placement on select boards in the testsuite
-Solvers that when viewed in the MATLAB editor form ASCII art, yet are still able to run
-Most sophisticated / complex board that the leading solver is able to completely fill with a vine

As I indicated in the newsgroup thread, since I misunderstood how the moves were being scored, I decided to update the visualize abilities of the runcontest code to better illustrate what’s going on. I’ve uploaded it to the File Exchange since I thought it might be helpful to others: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/33600

The additions I made are:
-Add board # to the tile so you know which board you are looking at

-Color code the vine. Green parts are ‘good’ and scored, red parts are ‘bad’ and truncated by the grade code. An arrow shows the ‘start direction’ of the vine, while and X shows the end of it.

-Color code the moves. Blue moves are ‘good’ and scored, yellow moves are ‘bad’ and truncated by the grade code. A circle indicates the ‘source’ of the move.

Hopefully you all will find this helpful too.