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We prove that the classic falling-block video game Tetris (both survival and board clearing) remains NP-complete even when restricted to 8 columns, or to 4 rows, settling open problems posed over 15 years ago [BDH+04]. Our reduction is from…
We study Snipperclips, a computer puzzle game whose objective is to create a target shape with two tools. The tools start as constant-complexity shapes, and each tool can snip (i.e., subtract its current shape from) the other tool. We study…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
We consider the repeated prisoner's dilemma (PD). We assume that players make their choices knowing only average payoffs from the previous stages. A player's strategy is a function from the convex hull $\mathfrak{S}$ of the set of payoffs…
Deck building is a crucial component in playing Collectible Card Games (CCGs). The goal of deck building is to choose a fixed-sized subset of cards from a large card pool, so that they work well together in-game against specific opponents.…
We examine the problem of efficiently learning coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in polyhedral games, that is, normal-form games with an exponentially large number of actions per player and an underlying combinatorial structure. Prominent…
Morpion Solitaire is a popular single player game, performed with paper and pencil. Due to its large state space (on the order of the game of Go) traditional search algorithms, such as MCTS, have not been able to find good solutions. A…
Automatic chess problem or puzzle composition typically involves generating and testing various different positions, sometimes using particular piece sets. Once a position has been generated, it is then usually tested for positional…
We present a new general board game (GBG) playing and learning framework. GBG defines the common interfaces for board games, game states and their AI agents. It allows one to run competitions of different agents on different games. It…
Wordle is a single-player word-based game where the objective is to guess the 5-letter word in a maximum of 6 tries. The game was released to the public in October 2021 and has since gained popularity with people competing against each…
Zeiger is a pencil puzzle consisting of a rectangular grid, with each cell having an arrow pointing in horizontal or vertical direction. Some cells also contain a positive integer. The objective of this puzzle is to fill a positive integer…
We prove that the 2017 puzzle game ZHED is NP-complete, even with just 1 tiles. Such a puzzle is defined by a set of unit-square 1 tiles in a square grid, and a target square of the grid. A move consists of selecting an unselected 1 tile…
The Game of Poker Chips, Dominoes and Survival fosters team building and high level cooperation in large groups, and is a tool applied in management training exercises. Each player, initially given two colored poker chips, is allowed to…
We study the problem of optimal games for the solo and coop modes of the board game Room 25 (season 1). We show that the game cannot be won in a single turn for any starting configuration, but that it can be done in two for some…
A cellular game is a dynamical system in which cells, placed in some discrete structure, are regarded as playing a game with their immediate neighbors. Individual strategies may be either deterministic or stochastic. Strategy success is…
This paper revisits a classical problem of slotted multiple access with success, idle, and collision events on each slot. First, results of a 2-user multiple access game are reported. The game was conducted at the University of Southern…
The author has long enjoyed using the CSP refinement checker FDR to solve puzzles, as witnessed by examples in \cite{tpc,ucs}. Recent experiments have shown that a number of games of patience (card games for one) are now well within bounds.…
Hex is a turn-based two-player connection game with a high branching factor, making the game arbitrarily complex with increasing board sizes. As such, top-performing algorithms for playing Hex rely on accurate evaluation of board positions…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
All roads lead to Rome is the core idea of the puzzle game Roma. It is played on an $n \times n$ grid consisting of quadratic cells. Those cells are grouped into boxes of at most four neighboring cells and are either filled, or to be…