Snipperclips: Cutting tools into desired polygons using themselves

Compilation copyright © 2017 Michiel Smid Copyright of individual papers retained by authors.All right reserved. We study Snipperclips, a computer puzzle game whose objective is to create a target shape with two tools. The tools start as constant-complexity shapes, and each tool can snip (i.e., subt...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Abel, Zachary, Akitaya, Hugo, Chiu, Man-Kwun, Demaine, Erik D, Demaine, Martin L, Hesterberg, Adam, Korman, Matias, Lynch, Jayson, van Renssen, André, Roeloffzen, Marcel
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier BV 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143963
Description
Summary:Compilation copyright © 2017 Michiel Smid Copyright of individual papers retained by authors.All right reserved. We study Snipperclips, a computer puzzle game whose objective is to create a target shape with two tools. The tools start as constant-complexity shapes, and each tool can snip (i.e., subtract its current shape from) the other tool. We study the computational problem of, given a target shape represented by a polygonal domain of n vertices, is it possible to create it as one of the tools' shape via a sequence of snip operations? If so, how many snip operations are required? We show that a polynomial number of snips suffice for two different variants of the problem.