BusOut is NP-complete
Computational Complexity
2025-05-15 v1
Abstract
This study examines the computational complexity of the decision problem modeled on the smartphone game Bus Out. The objective of the game is to load all the passengers in a queue onto appropriate buses using a limited number of bus parking spots by selecting and dispatching the buses on a map. We show that the problem is NP-complete, even for highly restricted instances. We also show that it is hard to approximate the minimum number of parking spots needed to solve a given instance.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.09165,
title = {BusOut is NP-complete},
author = {Takehiro Ishibashi and Ryo Yoshinaka and Ayumi Shinohara},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09165},
year = {2025}
}