The complexity of flood-filling games on graphs
release_ne3gzfxzrnhqhpcpgph5r2qy2y
by
Kitty Meeks, Alexander Scott
2011
Abstract
We consider the complexity of problems related to the combinatorial game
Free-Flood-It, in which players aim to make a coloured graph monochromatic with
the minimum possible number of flooding operations. Although computing the
minimum number of moves required to flood an arbitrary graph is known to be
NP-hard, we demonstrate a polynomial time algorithm to compute the minimum
number of moves required to link each pair of vertices. We apply this result to
compute in polynomial time the minimum number of moves required to flood a
path, and an additive approximation to this quantity for an arbitrary k x n
board, coloured with a bounded number of colours, for any fixed k. On the other
hand, we show that, for k>=3, determining the minimum number of moves required
to flood a k x n board coloured with at least four colours remains NP-hard.
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