I think I received this puzzle as a Christmas or birthday gift, but from whom I can't recall. It's been on the shelf for a while, and I remember having solved it at one time, but can't remember the solution. I'm sure that I just happened upon it randomly if I did know it.
Basically, Thinkominos is a puzzle with six hexagonal pieces. Each piece has six circles of color on the top, one for each of the piece's edges. Every colored circle on top of a single thinkomino is different, and is either red, orange, green, blue, yellow, or purple.
The purpose of the puzzle is to arrange the pieces into a pyramid shape so that every edge that is near another thinkomino matches the color of its adjacent edge. An illustration might be helpful:
You can see in this picture how the pieces are supposed to be arranged, although the colors mostly don't match. (Yeah, I'm not going to give you the solution to the puzzle directly.) Also illustrated in this picture are the patterns of the colored circles on top of the pieces. Each piece has a different sequence of colors. The letters on the pieces in my illustration are the clockwise colors on the piece, starting from the top left.
After messing around with random theories last night on how to arrange the pieces, I finally grew frustrated with the whole thing and wrote a program to solve the puzzle. (The link includes Delphi source.) In all, I would estimate that it took about 1.5 hours to write the program, mostly because I made it output the colorful illustrations as you've seen above. The programming is not exactly a work of art, but it gets the job done. The program iterates through all of the possible combinations, barring those that make the puzzle impossible to solve, and provides the six possible answers to the puzzle. If you're savvy, you'll note that there are really only 2 answers.
Anyway, I thought it was crafty, and it illustrates that yes, computers actually can solve problems, not just give teachers more reason to saddle you with longer than necessary writing projects.
