On complexity of flooding games on graphs with interval representations

Abstract

The flooding games, which are called Flood-It, Mad Virus, or HoneyBee, are a kind of coloring games and they have been becoming popular online. In these games, each player colors one specified cell in his/her turn, and all connected neighbor cells of the same color are also colored by the color. This flooding or coloring spreads on the same color cells. It is natural to consider the coloring games on general graphs: Once a vertex is colored, the flooding flows along edges in the graph. Recently, computational complexities of the variants of the flooding games on several graph classes have been studied. We investigate the one player flooding games on some graph classes characterized by interval representations. Our results state that the number of colors is a key parameter to determine the computational complexity of the flooding games. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.