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

Leucci S.
;
2016-01-01

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.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11697/179379
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