The buttons' colour determines the colour of bubbles on the board. The goal of the game is to use the perimeter buttons to toggle all the bubbles green.

The game actually unravels so-called 'satisfiability' problems -- classic and highly complicated mathematical questions that involve selecting the best arrangement of options.

In such quandaries, the solver must assign a set of variables to the right true or false categories so to fulfil all the constraints of the problem.

In the game, the bubbles represent constraints. They become green when they are satisfied. The perimeter buttons represent the variables. They are assigned to true or false when players click the mouse to make them yellow (true) or blue (false).

Once the puzzle is solved and all the bubbles are green, a computer scientist could simply look at the colour of each button to gather the solution of that particular problem, said an U-M release.

DeOrio will present a paper on the research on Thursday at the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco.