Coin-Moving Puzzles
Discrete Mathematics
2007-05-23 v1 Computational Geometry
Computer Science and Game Theory
Abstract
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of this paper is to specify exactly which of these games are solvable. By introducing the notion of a constant number of extra coins, we give tight theorems characterizing solvable puzzles on the square grid and equilateral-triangle grid. These existence results are supplemented by polynomial-time algorithms for finding a solution.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cs/0204002,
title = {Coin-Moving Puzzles},
author = {Erik D. Demaine and Martin L. Demaine and Helena A. Verrill},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0204002},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
25 pages, 33 figures. To appear in the book More Games of No Chance edited by Richard Nowakowski and published by MSRI