Related papers: Tetravex is NP-complete
The Calisson puzzle is a tiling puzzle in which one must tile a triangular grid inside a hexagon with lozenges, under the constraint that certain prescribed edges remain tile boundaries and that adjacent lozenges along these edges have…
Several articles deal with tilings with squares and dominoes on 2-dimensional boards, but only a few on boards in 3-dimensional space. We examine a tiling problem with colored cubes and bricks of $(2\times2\times n)$-board in three…
In this paper, we study the cooperative card game, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, is a game based on traditional trick-taking card games,…
We create a new two-player game on the Sperner Triangle based on Sperner's lemma. Our game has simple rules and several desirable properties. First, the game is always certain to have a winner. Second, like many other interesting games such…
We analyze the problem of packing squares in an online fashion: Given a semi-infinite strip of width 1 and an unknown sequence of squares of side length in [0,1] that arrive from above, one at a time. The objective is to pack these items as…
We study the puzzle graphs of hexagonal sliding puzzles of various shapes and with various numbers of holes. The puzzle graph is a combinatorial model which captures the solvability and the complexity of sequential mechanical puzzles.…
We introduce the idea that the P vs NP problem can have a finer structure. Given the NP complete problem of interest, the configurations space of the problem can be divided in (at least) two regions. In one region, polynomial algorithms to…
We are going to show that some variants of a puzzle called Pull in which the boxes have handles (i.e. we can only pull the boxes in certain directions) are NP-hard
In many applications, we want to influence the decisions of independent agents by designing incentives for their actions. We revisit a fundamental problem in this area, called GAME IMPLEMENTATION: Given a game in standard form and a set of…
A rectangular partition is the partition of an (axis-aligned) rectangle into interior-disjoint rectangles. We ask whether a rectangular partition permits a "nice" drawing of its dual, that is, a straight-line embedding of it such that each…
Mastermind is in essence a search problem in which a string of symbols that is kept secret must be found by sequentially playing strings that use the same alphabet, and using the responses that indicate how close are those other strings to…
We consider the complexity of deciding the winner of an election under the Slater rule. In this setting we are given a tournament $T = (V, A)$, where the vertices of V represent candidates and the direction of each arc indicates which of…
A tromino tiling problem is a packing puzzle where we are given a region of connected lattice squares and we want to decide whether there exists a tiling of the region using trominoes with the shape of an L. In this work we study a slight…
Convex clustering is an attractive clustering algorithm with favorable properties such as efficiency and optimality owing to its convex formulation. It is thought to generalize both k-means clustering and agglomerative clustering. However,…
Neighborhood Lights Out is a game played on graphs. Begin with a graph and a vertex labeling of the graph from the set $\{0,1,2,\dots, \ell-1\}$ for $\ell \in \mathbb{N}$. The game is played by toggling vertices: when a vertex is toggled,…
Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…
Hex is a well known connection game in which two players attempt to connect opposite sides of the board by colored stones. In 2022, Hamkins and Leonessi introduced an infinite version, in which the goal is to construct a certain kind of…
The number of ways to tile an $n$-board (an $n\times1$ rectangular board) with $(\frac12,\frac12;1)$-, $(\frac12,\frac12;2)$-, and $(\frac12,\frac12;3)$-combs is $T_{n+2}^2$ where $T_n$ is the $n$th tribonacci number. A…
A subset of the vertex set of a graph is geodetically convex if it contains every vertex on any shortest path between two elements of the subset. The convex hull of a set of vertices is the smallest convex set containing the set. We study…
Graph Pebbling is a well-studied single-player game on graphs. We introduce the game of Blocking Pebbles which adapts Graph Pebbling into a two-player strategy game in order to examine it within the context of Combinatorial Game Theory.…