Where to next?

At this point I've written pretty much everything there is to write regarding stuff like my solving process. And a lot of times when I solve something with hexominoes or heptominoes now, it isn't anything particularly interesting or challenging or worth telling the internet about - just more of the same.
So the plan for 2020 might be to sort of vary thing a little bit, still keeping it firmly to do with polyforms but not just a monthly 'Here's a bunch of pictures of heptomino constructions with not much in the way of descriptions to go with them' type posts. Which is what this place has a very real risk of becoming.

Fig. 1: Three 16x16 squares with the heptominoes.

See?

That one was actually solved with laser cutting in mind, if I ever wanted a nice new set of heptominoes, cutting this design from 3 small (180x180mm) pieces would be way more cost-effective than trying to cut them any other way. Probably.

Then a few weeks ago I solved (mostly) the one below. Instead of doing what I usually do and spreading out the set of heptominoes out all over the desk before solving manually, I did this by drawing it directly in MS Paint and crossing off the pieces from a list as I went. This has a few advantages - since I'm drawing the complete outer shape first I can guarantee I've put the centre hole in the right place. And it saves me having to redraw the solution once I've found it. And that's a fair enough trade off for not being able to backtrack nicely. And there being a risk of drawing pieces in wrong as well. For all the shortcomings of using a big ol' set of physical pieces, there's never the possibility that you'll place an n-omino with the wrong n while you're solving.

Fig. 2: Three 11x23 parallelograms. First two by hand, last one partially completed with computer search.

It's putting the last 15 or so pieces in that are the worst when you're doing this without a physical set. Backtracking and keeping track of which pieces have and haven't been used is just too much for my little mind. Especially when I'm tired and it's an evening and I've been at work all day. Which is most of the times I do things like this.

So yeah. Expect a more varied polyominoes blog in the new year hopefully.

Oh. And another thing. The future may involve octominoes a bit more...