Onur Sonmez / Designer

+ Sokoban Controller

Hacking a gamepad to design an experimental interface for the legendary game "sokoban".

finding an emulator which has the sokoban game and also supports a regular gamepad (in this case it's sega mastersystem). designing 2 walled prototype just to see how the interaction works. in the life size version you can push, rotate, touch the walls/borders with a normal size crate in order to play the game.

"Sokoban can be studied using the theory of computational complexity. The problem of solving Sokoban puzzles has been proven to be NP-hard. This is interesting also for artificial intelligence researchers, because solving Sokoban can be compared to designing a robot which moves boxes in a warehouse. Further work has shown that solving Sokoban is also PSPACE-complete. Sokoban is difficult not only due to its branching factor (which is comparable to chess, but still much lower than that of go), but also its enormous search tree depth; some levels require more than 1000 “pushes”. Skilled human players rely mostly on heuristics; they are usually able to quickly discard futile or redundant lines of play, and recognize patterns and subgoals, drastically cutting down on the amount of search."