The Troubles of Interior Design-A Complexity Analysis of the Game Heyawake

摘要

Heyawake is one of many recently popular Japanese pencil puzzles. We investigate the computational complexity of the problem of deciding whether a given puzzle instance has a solution or not. We show that Boolean gates can be emulated via Heyawake puzzles, and that it is possible to reduce the Boolean Satisfiability problem to Heyawake. It follows that the problem in question is NP-complete.