Special Section on Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications
On Computational Complexity of Pipe Puzzles
2019 Volume E102.A Issue 9 Pages 1134-1141
Details
2019 Volume E102.A Issue 9 Pages 1134-1141
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.
