Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but because the prefix should not be too long, and chemical process of modifying Endo with the prefix should not consume too much energy, this appears to be an example of constraint programming. Since constraint programming can often be carried out by constraint logic programming, I might suggest a logic programming approach for this problem.
Note that you have to execute the modified Endo to find out how many points a prefix will be awarded, which takes several seconds to several hours depending on your implementation. Since DNA is Turing complete, you cannot hope to evaluate a modified Endo without executing it. I therefore suggest to implement a DNA interpreter to produce RNA from DNA, and a RNA interpreter which produces pictures from RNA, and then to look at these pictures for clues how to proceed. Tillmann