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On Computational Complexity of Pipe Puzzles
Takumu SHIRAYAMA Takuto SHIGEMURA Yota OTACHI Shuichi MIYAZAKI Ryuhei UEHARA
Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences
Vol.E102-A
No.9
pp.1134-1141 Publication Date: 2019/09/01 Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E102.A.1134 Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications) Category: Puzzles Keyword: pipe puzzle, NP-completeness, polynomial-time algorithm,
Full Text: PDF(7MB)>>
Summary:
In this paper, we investigate computational complexity of pipe puzzles. A pipe puzzle is a kind of tiling puzzle; the input is a set of cards, and a part of a pipe is drawn on each card. For a given set of cards, we arrange them and connect the pipes. We have to connect all pipes without creating any local loop. While ordinary tiling puzzles, like jigsaw puzzles, ask to arrange the tiles with local consistency, pipe puzzles ask to join all pipes. We first show that the pipe puzzle is NP-complete in general even if the goal shape is quite restricted. We also investigate restricted cases and show some polynomial-time algorithms.
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