We investigate some algorithmic and mathematical aspects of Yin-Yang/Shiromaru-Kuromaru puzzles. Specifically, we discuss two algorithms for solving arbitrary Yin-Yang puzzles, namely the exhaustive search approach and the pruneand-search technique. We show that both algorithms have an identical asymptotic running time of O(max{mn, 2 mn−h }) for finding all solutions of a Yin-Yang instance with h hints of size m × n. Nevertheless, our experiments show that the practical running time of the prune-and-search technique outperforms the conventional exhaustive search approach.
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