Snipperclips: Cutting tools into desired polygons using themselves

Author(s)
Abel, Zachary; Akitaya, Hugo; Chiu, Man-Kwun; Demaine, Erik D; Demaine, Martin L; ... Show more
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Abstract
Compilation copyright © 2017 Michiel Smid Copyright of individual papers retained by authors.All right reserved. 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.
Date issued
2021
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143963
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Journal
Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Abel, Zachary, Akitaya, Hugo, Chiu, Man-Kwun, Demaine, Erik D, Demaine, Martin L et al. 2021. "Snipperclips: Cutting tools into desired polygons using themselves." Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 98.
Version: Author's final manuscript
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