Spiral Galaxies Puzzles are NP-complete
نویسنده
چکیده
We will show that the question of whether or not a given Spiral Galaxies puzzle has a solution is NP-complete. To do so, we construct Spiral Galaxies puzzles which correspond to arbitrary Boolean circuits. A circuit will be satisfied, (that is, have a set of inputs which give the desired outputs) if and only if the corresponding puzzle has a solution. Since Satisfiability is the canonical NP-complete problem [4], this will show that Spiral Galaxies puzzles are NP-hard. We complete the proof by showing that a solution to a Spiral Galaxies puzzle can be checked in polynomial time. Similar approaches to proving puzzles are NP-complete are taken in [1-3, 5-10].
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