Solving Nonograms (Picross)

Question

it\'s Friday afternoon, let\'s have a fun puzzle/algorithm problem to solve.

One of my favorite Nintendo DS games is Picross DS. The game is quite simple, it involves so

Answer 1

Yes, the problem is NP-complete, but that only means that you are (pretty much) stuck with exponentially growing run-times as the size of the puzzle grows. But in real life puzzle sizes don't grow. Hardly anyone bothers to build puzzles that are bigger than 100x100 and the vast majority are smaller than 50x50. Building a solver that will solve 95% of the puzzles published in books and magazines in a fraction of second is actually not particularly challenging. A fairly straight-forward depth-first search system will do it.

What's less obvious is that there is a small fraction of puzzles that are quite nasty and will cause run-times to explode for most simple solvers. Most of these are badly designed puzzles that are also difficult or impossible for humans to solve, but some are particularly clever puzzles that experienced human solvers can readily solve, using deeper insights than most AI programs can manage.

I've written a solver of my own that will solve most puzzles very quickly, and I've done a survey of many other solvers with benchmark results comparing their performance. I also have a discussion of an interesting class of hard puzzles (the Domino puzzles) that demonstrates how some puzzles that are not hard for a clever human prove very hard for most programs. Links to my solver and the Domino Puzzle will be found in the survey.

I think there is still a lot of room for improvement and would encourage people with fresh ideas to take a shot at it. But it's worth noting that the obvious things have been done and there isn't much use in doing them again.