Solving nurikabe with ant colony optimization
Martyn Amos, Matthew Crossley, Huw Lloyd · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2019
We present the first nature-inspired algorithm for the NP-complete Nurikabe pencil puzzle. Our method, based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), offers competitive performance with a direct logic-based solver, with improved run-time performance on smaller instances, but poorer performance on large instances. Importantly, our algorithm is "problem agnostic", and requires no heuristic information. This suggests the possibility of a generic ACO-based framework for the efficient solution of a wide range of similar logic puzzles and games. We further suggest that Nurikabe may provide a challenging benchmark for nature-inspired optimization.