Related papers: Zen Puzzle Garden is NP-complete
Building on the results published in arxiv:2004.12849 we present a general framework for demonstrating the NP-hardness of satisfying many genres of loop and path puzzles using a 'T-metacell' gadget. We then use this to prove the…
The pictorial jigsaw (PJ) puzzle is a well-known leisure game for humans. Usually, a PJ puzzle game is played by one or several human players face-to-face in the physical space. In this paper, we focus on how to solve PJ puzzles in the…
We study the correlated equilibrium polytope $P_G$ of a game $G$ from a combinatorial point of view. We introduce the region of full-dimensionality for this class of polytopes and prove that it is a semialgebraic set for any game. Using a…
We analyze the puzzle video game This Game Is Not Going To Load Itself, where the player routes data packets of three different colors from given sources to given sinks of the correct color. Given the sources, sinks, and some previously…
The Value Problem for weighted timed games (WTGs) consists in determining, given a two-player weighted timed game with a reachability objective and a rational threshold, whether or not the value of the game exceeds the threshold. This…
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 show that the higher-order matching problem is decidable using a game-theoretic argument.
Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a secret word $w$ that has been chosen from a dictionary $D$. In order to discover $w$, the player can make at most $\ell$ guesses, which must also be words from…
Satisfiability checking for monotone modal logic is known to be (only) NP-complete. We show that this remains true when the logic is extended with aconjunctive and alternation-free fixpoint operators as well as the universal modality; the…
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.…
In the (Nesting) Bird Box Problem we are given a polygonal domain P and a number k and we want to know if there is a set B of k points inside P such that no two points in B can see each other. The underlying idea is that each point…
We study the Constraint Satisfaction Problem CSP(A), where A is first-order definable in (Z;+,1) and contains +. We prove such problems are either in P or NP-complete.
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…
The purpose of this article is to examine and limit the conditions in which the P complexity class could be equivalent to the NP complexity class. Proof is provided by demonstrating that as the number of clauses in a NP-complete problem…
Modern board games are a rich source of interesting and new challenges for combinatorial problems. The game Nmbr9 is a solitaire style puzzle game using polyominoes. The rules of the game are simple to explain, but modelling the game…
The Honey-Bee game is a two-player board game that is played on a connected hexagonal colored grid or (in a generalized setting) on a connected graph with colored nodes. In a single move, a player calls a color and thereby conquers all the…
We show that, by using multiplicative weights in a game-theoretic thought experiment (and an important convexity result on the composition of multiplicative weights with the relative entropy function), a symmetric bimatrix game (that is, a…
We define a new impartial combinatorial game, Flag Coloring, based on flood filling. We then generalize to a graph game, and find values for many positions on two colors. We demonstrate that the generalized game is PSPACE-complete for two…
In the Nikoli pencil-and-paper game Tatamibari, a puzzle consists of an $m \times n$ grid of cells, where each cell possibly contains a clue among +, -, |. The goal is to partition the grid into disjoint rectangles, where every rectangle…
Poset games are a class of combinatorial game that remain unsolved. Soltys and Wilson proved that computing wining strategies is in \textbf{PSPACE} and aside from special cases such as Nim and N-Free games, \textbf{P} time algorithms for…