Rectangular Spiral Galaxies are Still Hard
Abstract
Spiral Galaxies is a pencil-and-paper puzzle played on a grid of unit squares: given a set of points called centers, the goal is to partition the grid into polyominoes such that each polyomino contains exactly one center and is 180{\deg} rotationally symmetric about its center. We show that this puzzle is NP-complete, ASP-complete, and #P-complete even if (a) all solutions to the puzzle have rectangles for polyominoes; or (b) the polyominoes are required to be rectangles and all solutions to the puzzle have just 11, 13, and 31 rectangles. The proof for the latter variant also implies NP/ASP/#P-completeness of finding a noncrossing perfect matching in distance-2 grid graphs where edges connect vertices of Euclidean distance 2. Moreover, we prove NP-completeness of the design problem of minimizing the number of centers such that there exists a set of galaxies that exactly cover a given shape
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2110.00058,
title = {Rectangular Spiral Galaxies are Still Hard},
author = {Erik D. Demaine and Maarten Löffler and Christiane Schmidt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.00058},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
24 pages, 24 figures. Thorough revision including new Section 2 proof which handles the promise problem