My dad bought me one on a long train ride, which had 8-way slides and a few years down the line, I happened to find it & ended up writing out a solver[1].<p>The problem is not particularly difficult though, I spent most of my time building out a graphviz "solution trail" to see my rankings[2].<p>[1] - <a href="http://notmysock.org/code/8puzzle.py" rel="nofollow">http://notmysock.org/code/8puzzle.py</a><p>[2] - <a href="http://notmysock.org/code/8puzzle.png" rel="nofollow">http://notmysock.org/code/8puzzle.png</a>