Computational Complexity of NURIKABE

  • Authors:

  • Markus Holzer;Andreas Klein;Martin Kutrib;Oliver Ruepp

  • Affiliations:

  • (Correspd.) Institut für Informatik, Universität Giessen, Arndtstr. 2, 35392 Giessen, Germany. {holzer,kutrib}@informatik.uni-giessen.de;Institut für Informatik, Universität Giessen, Arndtstr. 2, 35392 Giessen, Germany. {holzer,kutrib}@informatik.uni-giessen.de;Institut für Informatik, Universität Giessen, Arndtstr. 2, 35392 Giessen, Germany. {holzer,kutrib}@informatik.uni-giessen.de;Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany. ruepp@in.tum.de

  • Venue:
  • Fundamenta Informaticae - Theory that Counts: To Oscar Ibarra on His 70th Birthday
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We show that the popular pencil puzzle NURIKABE is intractable from the computational complexity point of view, that is, it is NP-complete, even when the involved numbers are 1 and 2 only. To this end, we show how to simulate Boolean gates by the puzzle under consideration. Moreover, we also study some NURIKABE variants, which remain NP-complete, too.