Scoring

Some investigations produce many solutions. Scoring solutions helps sort out which solutions are worth looking at more closely.

This is an imperfect rubrik; the highest scoring puzzle is not necessarily the best one. Because this is tuned for sorting the top of the list, rankings near the bottom of the list will be especially inaccurate.

The Leaderboard ranks every fully-solved, single-solution puzzle by a score computed from the measurements below.

Measurements

Each measurement starts at 10 (except Non-Dimension-Spanning Pieces, which starts at 0 and is rewarded upward) and is docked or credited points for whatever makes a solution more or less elegant, clamped so it never goes below 0 or above 10. The score shown on the Leaderboard is the sum of all ten, so the highest possible score is 100.

• Number of Pieces: 0-10 placed pieces score as themselves; every complete group of 3 pieces past 14 costs a point ("too many" pieces).
• Simple Board: 10, minus a point for every distinct flat face on the board's surface past 6 — a solid rectangular slab has just 6 faces no matter how large, but a notch or step splits a face in two and costs a point per split. This is the puzzle's board as given, before solving: pieces that overflow it (e.g. stacking above a flat board) don't change its shape.
• Constraints: 10, minus a point for every constraint flag the puzzle sets explicitly (each is a rule beyond the defaults) — e.g. a puzzle you must assess buried pieces to validate.
• Simple Piece Supply: 10, minus a point for every distinct piece type in the supply, past the first.
• Asymmetries: 10, minus a point for every rotation or reflection of the cube (other than leaving it alone) under which the solved board maps onto itself with every placed piece landing squarely on another same-sized piece — a solution with no such symmetry keeps the full 10, while a highly symmetric one is docked once per way it repeats itself.
• Dimension-Spanning Pieces: 10, minus a point for every case where a single placed piece's own footprint spans the board's full width, height, or depth — a piece can cost more than one point, once per axis it spans wall-to-wall. Depth counts only when allowSkyPieces is on; otherwise every piece rests on the floor, so only width and height count.
• Non-Dimension-Spanning Pieces: the flip side of Dimension-Spanning Pieces — 0, plus a point for every case where a placed piece's own footprint does not span the board's full width, height, or depth — rewarding pieces that interlock with their neighbors instead. As above, depth counts only when allowSkyPieces is on.
• Unused Piece Orientations: 10, minus a point for every distinct orientation of an actually-placed piece type that no placement in the solution used — rewards a piece type being explored in several of its orientations rather than the same one repeated.
• Fault Lines: 10, minus 4 points for the first grid-aligned plane that splits the solved board into two non-empty halves without cutting through any placed piece, then 3, 2 and 1 for the next three (so 4 fault lines take it to 0) — a solution with a fault line is one you could accidentally pull apart along that line.
• Rectangle Pairs: 10, minus a point for every pair of placed pieces whose footprints, seen from above, together exactly fill a rectangle that no other piece reaches into at or above the pair's lowest level — such a pair is a self-contained block that could be rearranged on its own. Two pieces stacked on the same cells count too.