English

Rectangular Spiral Galaxies are Still Hard

Computational Geometry 2022-07-22 v2

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 1×\times1, 1×\times3, and 3×\times1 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

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:32:16.871Z