Automatic Making of Sokoban Problems

This paper describes our program that makes Sokoban problems automatically. Sokoban is one of one-person puzzles invented in Japan. The program consists of three stages: generation, checking and evaluation. First, candidates for problems are generated randomly by a prototype and three templates. Second, unsolvable candidates are removed by the Sokoban solver. Finally trivial or uninteresting candidates are removed by the evaluator. The problems that the program made are judged good by human experts. Creation of art by computer is an important target of Artificial Intelligence. Our work can be characterized one of the attempts to create some arts by computers.