Complexity of 2D Snake Cube Puzzles
Computational Complexity
2024-07-16 v1 Computational Geometry
Abstract
Given a chain of cubes where each cube is marked "turn " or "go straight", when can it fold into a rectangular box? We prove several variants of this (still) open problem NP-hard: (1) allowing some cubes to be wildcard (can turn or go straight); (2) allowing a larger box with empty spaces (simplifying a proof from CCCG 2022); (3) growing the box (and the number of cubes) to (improving a prior 3D result from height to ); (4) with hexagonal prisms rather than cubes, each specified as going straight, turning , or turning ; and (5) allowing the cubes to be encoded implicitly to compress exponentially large repetitions.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2407.10323,
title = {Complexity of 2D Snake Cube Puzzles},
author = {MIT Hardness Group and Nithid Anchaleenukoon and Alex Dang and Erik D. Demaine and Kaylee Ji and Pitchayut Saengrungkongka},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.10323},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
24 pages, 20 figures. Short version published at 36th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2024)