Related papers: Notes on solving and playing peg solitaire on a co…
"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…
We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…
The game of Spot it(R) is based on an order 7 finite projective plane. This article presents a solitaire challenge: extract an order 7 affine plane and arrange those 49 cards into a square such that the symmetries of the affine and…
We have developed a program called MUDoS (Maastricht University Domineering Solver) that solves Domineering positions in a very efficient way. This enables the solution of known positions so far (up to the 10 x 10 board) much quicker…
We present and analyze PackIt!, a turn-based game consisting of packing rectangles on an $n \times n$ grid. PackIt! can be easily played on paper, either as a competitive two-player game or in \emph{solitaire} fashion. On the $t$-th turn, a…
Tetravex is a widely played one person computer game in which you are given $n^2$ unit tiles, each edge of which is labelled with a number. The objective is to place each tile within a $n$ by $n$ square such that all neighbouring edges are…
We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…
The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and…
In the game of pegging, each vertex of a graph is considered a hole into which a peg can be placed. A pegging move is performed by jumping one peg over another peg, and then removing the peg that has been jumped over from the graph. We…
We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…
Simple board games, like Tic-Tac-Toe and CONNECT-4, play an important role not only in the development of mathematical and logical skills, but also in the emotional and social development. In this paper, we address the problem of generating…
We present a strong solution of the board game pentago, computed using exhaustive parallel retrograde analysis in 4 hours on 98304 ($3 \times 2^{15}$) threads of NERSC's Cray Edison. At $3.0 \times 10^{15}$ states, pentago is the largest…
A novel user friendly method is proposed for calibrating a procam system from a single pose of a planar chessboard target. The user simply needs to orient the chessboard in a single appropriate pose. A sequence of Gray Code patterns are…
We first prove that solving Mahjong Solitaire boards with peeking is NP-complete, even if one only allows isolated stacks of the forms /aab/ and /abb/. We subsequently show that layouts of isolated stacks of heights one and two can always…
Bridge is a trick-taking card game requiring the ability to evaluate probabilities since it is a game of incomplete information where each player only sees its cards. In order to choose a strategy, a player needs to gather information about…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…
The classical Maker-Breaker positional game is played on a board which is a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, with two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately claiming vertices of $\mathcal{H}$ until all the vertices are claimed. When the game…
The game of Go has a long history in East Asian countries, but the field of Computer Go has yet to catch up to humans until the past couple of years. While the rules of Go are simple, the strategy and combinatorics of the game are immensely…
Concurrent and parallel programming (CPP) is an increasingly important subject in Computer Science Education. However, the conceptual shift from sequential programming is notoriously difficult to make. Currently, relatively little research…