Path-Filter Minimals

• Guide
• Minimals
• Solution finder

The output from this may be bigger than the smallest possible set, but the difference can be marginal (one or two solves) as a trade-off for being able to find small solution sets quickly for setups whose strict minimals can’t be found within a reasonable timeframe.

Knewjade made Path-Filter to generate small sets of solutions like sfinder-strict-minimal with a faster method, but it has some downsides:

• The generated set isn’t guaranteed to be the smallest possible set.
• The generated set can’t be chosen; it only finds one specific set among potentially multiple.

There aren’t many extraneous things necessary to use this program. When using it, Knewjade provides a command that shouldn’t need to be changed for most use cases.

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java -jar path-filter.jar 5.0 1.0 3.0 300000

1. Getting path-filter is similar to sfinder. Grab the latest release from this direct download link.
2. The path-filter.jar file should extracted to the /output/ folder in the sfinder folder.

The following examples are pulled directly from the official documentation by Knewjade. It can be found within the .zip file when downloading path-filter.

Generate a path.csv file. It should have -f csv and -k p. The -c parameter in here indicates that the field is five lines tall. The terminal’s directory for this should be set to the folder where sfinder.jar is in.

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java -jar sfinder.jar path -t v115@zgB8EeE8EeE8FeF8CeC8JeAgH -p '*! -f csv -k p -c 5

Run the default path-filter command. Make sure that the terminal directory is set to the folder where path.csv is (the /output/ folder).

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java -jar path-filter.jar 5.0 1.0 3.0 300000

After entering this, the program starts printing outputs.

• If the “best” value starts stagnating, it should be fine to end the program. For PowerShell and command prompt, that can be done with Ctrl + C (assuming you haven’t selected any text).
• To get a combined fumen of the filtered solutions and to make sure sol% hasn’t been degraded, you can use java -jar path-filter.jar verify.
• You can also open output.txt in the same folder to get a list of the solutions chosen by path-filter.
• Run the program multiple times to be able to pick between different results. The number of solutions may be the same, but the chosen solutions may vary. Make sure to save solution sets you find notable because re-running the program will overwrite the contents of output.txt.

This is the final output I chose. It has 27 solutions.