Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this features are somehow related to their computational complexity [5]. Indeed, many puzzle games - such as Mah-Jongg, Sokoban, Candy Crush, and 2048, to name a few - are known to be NP-hard [3, 4, 7, 10]. In this paper we consider Trainyard: a popular mobile puzzle game whose goal is to get colored trains from their initial stations to suitable destination stations. We prove that the problem of determining whether there exists a solution to a given Trainyard level is NP-hard. We also provide an implementation of our hardness reduction1.
Trainyard is NP-hard / Almanza, M.; Leucci, S.; Panconesi, A.. - 49:(2016). (Intervento presentato al convegno 8th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms, FUN 2016 tenutosi a La Maddalena, Italy) [10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2016.2].
Trainyard is NP-hard
Almanza M.;Leucci S.;Panconesi A.
2016
Abstract
Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this features are somehow related to their computational complexity [5]. Indeed, many puzzle games - such as Mah-Jongg, Sokoban, Candy Crush, and 2048, to name a few - are known to be NP-hard [3, 4, 7, 10]. In this paper we consider Trainyard: a popular mobile puzzle game whose goal is to get colored trains from their initial stations to suitable destination stations. We prove that the problem of determining whether there exists a solution to a given Trainyard level is NP-hard. We also provide an implementation of our hardness reduction1.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
