Rush hour (game)
Rush Hour is a thinking game and Puzzle won for a player from 8 years, the number of prizes. It was developed in the late 1970s by the Japanese game inventor Nob Yoshigahara (1936-2004). It went on sale in 1996, initially in the United States . The manufacturer is ThinkFun Inc., the German version is distributed by HCM Kinzel .
Gameplay
The game consists of a 6 × 6 field (made of plastic), a red car that has to be freed from a traffic jam (two fields in size), as well as eleven blocking cars (two fields each) and four blocking trucks (three each Fields) in different colors. The game equipment includes 40 task cards, which are housed in a drawer integrated in the game board. First, a number of vehicles are placed on the playing field as indicated on the task card.
The task now is to maneuver the red car to the (only) exit by maneuvering the vehicles. The red car, as well as the blocking vehicles, may only be moved forwards or backwards in their direction of travel, i.e. That is, a vehicle may only be moved horizontally or only vertically. No vehicle may skip another. If the red car can finally leave the exit unscathed, the task is solved. The other "blocking" vehicles are not allowed to leave the field of play.
Rush hour promotes - in addition to the ability to concentrate - logical, especially recursive thinking and problem-solving skills . The tasks of the easiest degree of difficulty can be solved quickly in a few moves, while the most difficult tasks require more than 40 maneuvering operations. The solution to each task is noted on the back of the relevant task card. Three expansion sets with additional task cards are available in stores.
Game variants
Several players can play against each other if the number of moves made that exceeds the minimum number of moves required is counted as penalty points. Rush Hour is now also available on the Internet in a Java applet and in a Flash version that can be played for free using a web browser , and as a mobile app .
Complexity-theoretical and algorithmic results
The question of whether the game generalized to an n × n grid has a solution is a PSPACE -complete decision problem. Mark Stamp et al. showed that the level of difficulty of the 40 included rush hour tasks correlates with the minimum number of moves required. The most difficult start-up configuration or task for rush hour in this sense requires 51 moves. If, on the other hand, one does not count the moves but the number of steps required, the most difficult start configuration in this other sense requires only 49 moves, but the largest possible number of 93 steps.
Similar games
Web links
- Rush Hour (1996) in the Luding games database
- Database with all interesting start configurations
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rush Hour Traffic Jam Puzzle (puzzles.com)
- ^ Gary W. Flake, Eric B. Baum: Rush Hour is PSPACE-complete, or "Why you should generously tip parking lot attendants" . NEC Research Institute, Princeton, New Jersey, 2007
- ^ Mark Stamp, Brad Engel, Victor Morrow, Mcintosh Ewell: Rush Hour and Dijkstra's algorithm . Graph Theory Notes of New York XL, 2001, pp. 23-30, MR1823243. Department of Computer Science, San Jose State University
- ^ Michael Fogleman: Solving Rush Hour, the Puzzle . How I created a database of all interesting rush hour configurations. 2018
- ^ Sébastien Collette, Jean-François Raskin, Frédéric Servais: On the Symbolic Computation of the Hardest Configurations of the RUSH HOUR Game . Free University of Brussels, 2006
- ^ Rush Hour Initial Configurations ( Memento of April 5, 2018 in the Internet Archive ), Frédéric Servais, Free University of Brussels