StenoSolver App for Windows

A Console Application that runs on 64-bit Windows OS machines is available for download by clicking the button below. Download the .zip file and unzip it; it contains a single file, named StenoSolver.exe. Run this .exe file to use StenoSolver locally.

When running the StenoSolver Console App, type ? to get help. The solver's settings (vocabulary to use, maximum positions to evaluate, maximum multiple solutions to show, etc.) can be changed by typing commands at the prompt, rather than steno strings to be solved. For example, typing 6(a&6)a4bxx will start a solve, while typing something like VOCABULARY PGN or LIMIT 500K will modify one of the application's settings.

If you wish to use the StenoSolver to set or solve extremely difficult puzzles, working with the Windows Console App may be your preferred solution.

The Console App allows you to devote more processing power, if you wish, to help solve or set more difficult puzzles. To avoid impacting other users and other Websites that run on this server, the site caps (at 200K) the number of positions per steno mark that it will examine, but in the Windows Console App, the limit is much higher — 2 billion. Furthermore, with the Console App, you can control the number of concurrent solver tasks that are put to work on the puzzle by using a command like TASKS 16, to increase the number of solver tasks to be used from its default value (4, which is used here on the Website). [Whether this would actually significantly speed up the StenoSolver depends on your particular hardware, of course.]

Additionally, the Console App allows you to raise the number of "cooks" that the solver keeps track of. For performance reasons, the number is fixed at 1 here on the Website, but in the Console App you can raise it as high as you wish (if for any reason you need to see detailed move-sequences leading to the same solution positions; note that the speed-to-solve will be impacted).

Furthermore, the Console App lets you specify a starting position for a steno, rather than being limited to only puzzles that start from the normal game-start position of a standard chess game.

Finally, the Console App allows you to continue solves from checkpoints in "chunks" of the saved positions, so that you can split up the job, if it turns out that proving a complex puzzle's solution to be unique would run your computer out of resources when done in a single sitting. The Console App also lets you SAVE and LOAD checkpoints on disk, and write the results of a solve to a local FILE.