Related papers: Twenty-Five Moves Suffice for Rubik's Cube
A generalized `$15$ puzzle' consists of an $n \times n$ numbered grid, with one missing number. A move in the game switches the position of the empty square with the position of one of its neighbors. We solve Diaconis' `15 puzzle problem'…
What is the average number of tosses needed before a particular sequence of heads and tails turns up? We solve the problem didactically, starting with doubles, finding that a tail, followed by a head, turns up on the average after only four…
An effective search bound is established for the least non-trivial integer zero of an arbitrary integral cubic form in at least 17 variables.
We report on progress in modelling and solving Puzznic, a video game requiring the player to plan sequences of moves to clear a grid by matching blocks. We focus here on levels with no moving blocks. We compare a planning approach and three…
We analyze Solo Chess puzzles, where the input is an $n \times n$ board containing some standard Chess pieces of the same color, and the goal is to make a sequence of capture moves to reduce down to a single piece. Prior work analyzes this…
Consider a bin containing $n$ balls colored with two colors. In a $k$-query, $k$ balls are selected by a questioner and the oracle's reply is related (depending on the computation model being considered) to the distribution of colors of the…
Using unknotting number, we introduce a link diagram invariant of Hass and Nowik type, which changes at most by 2 under a Reidemeister move. As an application, we show that a certain infinite sequence of diagrams of the trivial…
Let $d$ be a fixed positive integer and let $\epsilon>0$. It is shown that for every sufficiently large $n\geq n_0(d,\epsilon)$, the $d$-dimensional unit cube can be decomposed into exactly $n$ smaller cubes such that the ratio of the side…
We develop a new algorithm for fitting circles that does not have drawbacks commonly found in existing circle fits. Our fit achieves ultimate accuracy (to machine precision), avoids divergence, and is numerically stable even when fitting…
In the `Covering' pursuit game on a graph, a robber and a set of cops play alternately, with the cops each moving to an adjacent vertex (or not moving) and the robber moving to a vertex at distance at most 2 from his current vertex. The aim…
A common problem to all applications of linear finite dynamical systems is analyzing the dynamics without enumerating every possible state transition. Of particular interest is the long term dynamical behaviour. In this paper, we study the…
The game of Go is more challenging than other board games, due to the difficulty of constructing a position or move evaluation function. In this paper we investigate whether deep convolutional networks can be used to directly represent and…
We consider the problem of determining the maximum number of moves required to sort a permutation of $[n]$ using cut-and-paste operations, in which a segment is cut out and then pasted into the remaining string, possibly reversed. We give…
A human is a thing that moves in space. Like all things that move in space, we can in principle use differential equations to describe their motion as a set of functions that maps time to position (and velocity, acceleration, and so on).…
Bingo is played on a $5\times 5$ grid. Take the 25 squares to be the ground set of a closure system in which square $s$ is dependent on a set $S$ of squares iff $s$ completes a line - a row, column, or diagonal - with squares that are…
When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…
Sudoku is a famous logic puzzle where the player has to fill a number between 1 and 9 into each empty cell of a $9 \times 9$ grid such that every number appears exactly once in each row, each column, and each $3 \times 3$ block. In 2020,…
A solution of the n-body problem in R^d is a relative equilibrium if all of the mutual distance between the bodies are constant. In other words, the bodies undergo a rigid motion. Here we investigate the possibility of partially rigid…
We consider quantum algorithms for the unique sink orientation problem on cubes. This problem is widely considered to be of intermediate computational complexity. This is because there no known polynomial algorithm (classical or quantum)…
Recently, it is shown that quantum computers can be used for obtaining certain information about the solution of a linear system Ax=b exponentially faster than what is possible with classical computation. Here we first review some key…