I found a very promising paper called “an introduction to the conjugate gradient method without the agonizing pain” and started working through it. I have only gotten through the first 10 pages or so, but it is helping me think of narrower research questions. I have also skimmed through a fair number of NP-completeness reductions, and have a much better idea about the background work I will need to do to be able to work on the Parks Puzzle problem. Some especially strange and interesting reductions I have come across are a reduction of SAT to minesweeper and a reduction of the Hamiltonian cycle problem for cubic graphs to the zen garden puzzle, which use boolean ‘gadgets’ and nodes and edges that can be combined to create instances of the game.