Related papers: The flipping puzzle on a graph
If taken seriously, the advice in the title leads to interesting combinatorics. Consider $N$ people moving between $M$ rooms as follows: at each step, simultaneously, the smartest person in each room moves to a different room of their…
The Union Closed Sets Conjecture is one of the most renowned problems in combinatorics. Its appeal lies in the simplicity of its statement contrasted with the potential complexity of its resolution. The conjecture posits that, in any union…
We show that the triangulations of a finite point set form a flip graph that can be embedded isometrically into a hypercube, if and only if the point set has no empty convex pentagon. Point sets of this type include convex subsets of…
A graph $G$ realizes the degree sequence $S$ if the degrees of its vertices is $S$. Hakimi gave a necessary and sufficient condition to guarantee that there exists a connected multigraph realizing $S$. Taylor later proved that any connected…
The mathematical structure of the widely popular Sudoku puzzles is akin to typical hard constraint satisfaction problems that lie at the heart of many applications, including protein folding and the general problem of finding the ground…
Extending the work of Godsil and others, we investigate the notion of the inverse of a graph (specifically, of bipartite graphs with a unique perfect matching). We provide a concise necessary and sufficient condition for the invertibility…
In graph pegging, we view each vertex of a graph as a hole into which a peg can be placed, with checker-like ``pegging moves'' allowed. Motivated by well-studied questions in graph pebbling, we introduce two pegging quantities. The pegging…
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…
A graph is near-planar if it can be obtained from a planar graph by adding an edge. We show the surprising fact that it is NP-hard to compute the crossing number of near-planar graphs. A graph is 1-planar if it has a drawing where every…
Given a point set $\mathcal{P}$ and a plane perfect matching $\mathcal{M}$ on $\mathcal{P}$, a flip is an operation that replaces two edges of $\mathcal{M}$ such that another plane perfect matching on $\mathcal{P}$ is obtained. Given two…
The ``overlapping-cycles shuffle'' mixes a deck of $n$ cards by moving either the $n$th card or the $(n-k)$th card to the top of the deck, with probability half each. We determine the spectral gap for the location of a single card, which,…
Consider the interchange process on a connected graph $G=(V,E)$ on $n$ vertices. I.e.\ shuffle a deck of cards by first placing one card at each vertex of $G$ in a fixed order and then at each tick of the clock, picking an edge uniformly at…
We investigate the poset of skew diagrams ordered by adding or forming the union of skew diagrams. We will show that a skew diagram which has at least n convex corners to the upper left and also to the lower right is larger than the skew…
A graph vertex-subset problem defines which subsets of the vertices of an input graph are feasible solutions. We view a feasible solution as a set of tokens placed on the vertices of the graph. A reconfiguration variant of a vertex-subset…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
We study the perfect matching reconfiguration problem: Given two perfect matchings of a graph, is there a sequence of flip operations that transforms one into the other? Here, a flip operation exchanges the edges in an alternating cycle of…
A graph composition is a partition of the vertex set such that each member of the partition induces a connected sub- graph, and the composition number of a graph is the number of possible graph compositions. A partition of a set S of…
We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…
A rotor configuration on a graph contains in every vertex an infinite ordered sequence of rotors, each is pointing to a neighbor of the vertex. After sampling a configuration according to some probability measure, a rotor walk is a…
The directions of an infinite graph $G$ are a tangle-like description of its ends: they are choice functions that choose compatibly for all finite vertex sets $X\subseteq V(G)$ a component of $G-X$. Although every direction is induced by a…