English

Paintbucket on graphs is PSPACE-complete

Combinatorics 2024-12-02 v1 Computational Complexity

Abstract

The game of Paintbucket was recently introduced by Amundsen and Erickson. It is played on a rectangular grid of black and white pixels. The players alternately fill in one of their opponent's connected components with their own color, until the entire board is just a single color. The player who makes the last move wins. It is not currently known whether there is a simple winning strategy for Paintbucket. In this paper, we consider a natural generalization of Paintbucket that is played on an arbitrary simple graph, and we show that the problem of determining the winner in a given position of this generalized game is PSPACE-complete.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.19373,
  title  = {Paintbucket on graphs is PSPACE-complete},
  author = {Ethan J. Saunders and Peter Selinger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.19373},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

7 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:16:17.215Z