Abstract
Following Wilson (J. Comb. Th. (B), 1975), Johnson (J. of Alg., 1983), and Kornhauser, Miller and Spirakis (25th FOCS, 1984), we consider a game that consists of moving distinct pebbles along the edges of an undirected graph. At most one pebble may reside in each vertex at any time, and it is only allowed to move one pebble at a time (which means that the pebble must be moved to a previously empty vertex). We show that the problem of finding the shortest sequence of moves between two given “pebble configuations” is NP-Hard.
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Garey, M.R., Johnson, D.S.: Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness, p. 221. Freeman, San Francisco (1979)
Johnson, D.S.: The NP-Completeness Column: An Ongoing Guide. J. of Algorithms 4, 397–411 (1983)
Kornhauser, D.M., Miller, G., Spirakis, P.: Coordinating Pebble Motion on Graphs, the Diameter of Permutation Groups, and Applications. In: Proc. of the 25th FOCS, pp. 241–250 (1984)
Wilson, R.W.: Graphs, Puzzles, Homotopy, and Alternating Groups. J. of Comb. Th. (B) 16, 86–96 (1974)
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Goldreich, O. (2011). Finding the Shortest Move-Sequence in the Graph-Generalized 15-Puzzle Is NP-Hard. In: Goldreich, O. (eds) Studies in Complexity and Cryptography. Miscellanea on the Interplay between Randomness and Computation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6650. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22670-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22670-0_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-22669-4
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