Cross-paradigm modelling: a study of Puzznic

Puzznic is a tile-matching video game published by Taito in 1989 and ported to many platforms. The player manipulates blocks in a given grid until they match when two or more blocks of the same pattern are adjacent and are removed from play. The goal is to match all patterned blocks in the grid. Puzznic is rich in structure: levels have internal platforms and the blocks are affected by gravity, leading to complex state changes and the possibility of a cascaded series of matches following each move by the player. The puzzle is therefore a significant challenge to model, motivating our study. We study Puzznic from both constraint modelling and AI Planning perspectives, identifying their complementary strengths and weaknesses for this problem. We further exploit our constraint model to produce an automated tool for instance generation, parameterised on the grid, the combination of patterned blocks, and the steps required.