Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:

Erik D. Demaine, Matias Korman, André van Renssen, and Marcel Roeloffzen, “Snipperclips: Cutting Tools into Desired Polygons using Themselves”, in Proceedings of the 29th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2017), Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, July 26–28, 2017, to appear.

Abstract:

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.

Length:

The paper is 6 pages.

Availability:

The paper is available in PDF (924k).

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Snipperclips_CGTA (Snipperclips: Cutting Tools into Desired Polygons using Themselves)