Losing at Checkers is Hard
Jeffrey Bosboom (1), Spencer Congero (2), Erik D. Demaine (1), Martin, L. Demaine (1), Jayson Lynch (1) ((1) MIT CSAIL, (2) Department of Electrical, and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego)
TL;DR
This paper establishes the computational complexity of various checkers variants, proving they are NP-complete or PSPACE-complete, and introduces cooperative checkers puzzles with solutions as alphabet letters.
Contribution
It provides the first complexity classifications for several checkers variants and introduces novel cooperative checkers puzzles with alphabetic solutions.
Findings
Deciding winning moves is NP-complete.
Always being able to jump is PSPACE-complete.
Cooperative checkers puzzles can encode alphabet letters.
Abstract
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is PSPACE-complete; and (3) cooperative versions of (1) and (2) are NP-complete. We also give cooperative checkers puzzles whose solutions are the letters of the alphabet.
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Taxonomy
TopicsArtificial Intelligence in Games · Video Analysis and Summarization · Algorithms and Data Compression