It is real brute force, but I do not investigate some stupid nodes. If I choose to not use an available jar during a timestep, I disqualify that jar, until another jar has been used, since there is no point in waiting to use a jar unless you want to save your balls for another jar.

The code is ugly and undocumented. I think the same could be accomplished in less than 10 lines of Haskell :). http://pastebin.com/MfXK9fwS

An implementation detail is that my branches are actually "jar1" "jar2" and "stepforward". To use a jar many times, you do jar1, jar1, stepforward.