A framework for visualizing hardness reductions to grid-based games

Abstract

Hardness proofs for grid-based games often use gadgets connected together to represent computational problems. We present an open-source framework to implement these reductions, producing actual game instances out of hard computational instances. Our framework first converts the input problem instance into a graph, then draws the graph in an integer grid (a kind of orthogonal graph drawing problem), and finally replaces nodes and edges in this layout with gadgets. To ensure that the final output is aligned, we use linear programming to constrain how gadgets connect. We apply this framework to Circuit SAT and use it to show examples of reductions to Akari and Minesweeper. Lastly, we describe possible future optimizations to the framework to make the output smaller and how to extend it for a wider variety of games.