I Solved Klotski
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people point to it for intuition about why some games are hard to navigate and for its Rush Hour and graph visualizations.
What it is
2swap explains how he solved the Klotski sliding-block puzzle by mapping its full state space as a graph and visualizing it. The video includes footage of the Guinness world-record solve and links to an interactive graph.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends chii · 2025-09 · on “What Is Complexity in Chess?”
This reminds me of this nice video : [this video] basically, the state space of the game can produce some intuition on why certain games are hard, and is demonstrated as a clustering of various states that are only linked to the winning state by a very small number of edges. So a player can easily "get lost" in the maze.
Recommends ohc · 2025-12 · on “Solving Rush Hour, the Puzzle (2018)”
Great article, very impressive to solve the entire game, rather than just individual puzzles. PS: Good chance that if you're reading these comments that you will appreciate this video by 2swap, visualising solutions to Rush Hour in 3D: [this video]
Recommends sublinear · 2026-02 · on “Like Game-of-Life, but on Growing Graphs, with WASM and WebGL”
This looks similar to the graphs on "2swap"[1]. Worth a watch if you haven't by now. [1] [this video]
Cites dzaima · 2025-09 · on “Klotski”
This is an interactive accompaniment to a video that contains more information: [this video] (previously discussed a bit at [LINK] )