Sokoban is PSPACE-complete

Draft

Joseph Culberson

University of Alberta

Abstract:

It is shown that the popular puzzle Sokoban can be used to emulate a linear bounded automata (finite tape Turing Machine (TM)). In particular, a construction is given that has a solution if and only if the corresponding Turing Machine on its input halts in the accept state. Further, if the TM halts and accepts, then the pusher will make moves and pushes, where n is the number of symbols on the input tape, and t(n) is the number of transitions made by the TM during its computation. This construction shows that the puzzles are PSPACE-complete, solving the open problem stated in [1].





& Culberson

Thu Apr 3 11:48:56 MST 1997