When we went up to my father-in-law's last weekend, he had a wooden game puzzle from The Mandalay Box Company, called "Setting Sun". During the whole 3-days that we were there, it was solved twice, neither of the times by myself. I am either really good or really bad with a puzzle. This time, I was bad. So rather than admit defeat, I wrote an applet to help determine the solution. Their website has a solution as well, but where is the fun in just looking it up?
Here is a page of the "Escape" programs I wrote. Some of the ideas were gleaned from first studying how Mazeworks did their puzzles, but I ended up basically starting over with new Applet, Canvas, Piece classes.