 It was soon realised that it was trivial to fill the board almost completely, to an "end-game position" where an irregularly-shaped void had to be filled with only a few pieces, at which point the pieces left would be the "wrong shapes" to fill the remaining space.The hope of solving the end-game depended vitally on having pieces that were easy to tile together in a variety of shapes.Computer searches were carried out to find which pieces tiled well or badly, and these data used to alter otherwise-standard backtracking search programs to use the bad pieces first, in the hope of being left with only good pieces in the hard final part of the search.