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We show that it is NP-Complete to decide whether a bimatrix game is degenerate and it is Co-NP-Complete to decide whether a bimatrix game is nondegenerate.

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-05-20 Ye Du

We study three problems related to the computational complexity of the popular game Minesweeper. The first is consistency: given a set of clues, is there any arrangement of mines that satisfies it? This problem has been known to be…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-04-24 MIT Hardness Group , Della Hendrickson , Andy Tockman

Hotaru Beam is a logic puzzle which objective is to connect circles placed on a grid by drawing only lines with specified starting points and numbers of bends. A zero-knowledge proof is a communication protocol that allows one player to…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Taisei Otsuji , Peter Fulla , Takuro Fukunaga

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are an emerging technology that has become the solution to efficiently provide security and privacy along with the transparency requirement of blockchains. ZKPs are usually expressed by means of arithmetic…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Miguel Isabel , Enric Rodríguez-Carbonell , Clara Rodríguez-Núñez , Albert Rubio

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.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-01-05 Ray Karpman , Erika Roldan

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Alessandro Giovanni Alberti , Flavio Chierichetti , Mirko Giacchini , Daniele Muscillo , Alessandro Panconesi , Erasmo Tani

We show that the maximum success probability of players sharing quantum entanglement in a two-player game with classical questions of logarithmic length and classical answers of constant length is NP-hard to approximate to within constant…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-11-24 Anand Natarajan , Thomas Vidick

The \emph{stationary set splitting game} is a game of perfect information of length $\omega_{1}$ between two players, \unspls and \spl, in which \unspls chooses stationarily many countable ordinals and \spls tries to continuously divide…

Logic · Mathematics 2010-03-15 Paul Larson , Saharon Shelah

We extend the study of the 2-Solo Chess problem which was first introduced by Aravind, Misra, and Mittal in 2022. 2-Solo Chess is a single-player variant of chess in which the player must clear the board via captures such that only one…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Kolja Kühn , Wendy Yi

A shuffle of two strings is formed by interleaving the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. A string is a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings. There is a known polynomial time dynamic…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2012-12-03 Sam Buss , Michael Soltys

It is NP-hard to decide if a given pure-strategy Nash equilibrium of a given three-player game in strategic form with integer payoffs is trembling hand perfect.

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2008-12-03 Peter Bro Miltersen

The main result of this paper is that computing the value of a one-clock priced timed game (OCPTG) is PSPACE-hard. Along the way, we provide a family of OCPTGs that have an exponential number of event points. Both results hold even in very…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-06 John Fearnley , Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen , Rahul Savani

In the Binary Networked Public Goods game, every player needs to decide if she participates in a public project whose utility is shared equally by the community. We study the problem of deciding if there exists a pure strategy Nash…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Arnab Maiti , Palash Dey

We prove that the art gallery problem is equivalent under polynomial time reductions to deciding whether a system of polynomial equations over the real numbers has a solution. The art gallery problem is a classical problem in computational…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2018-05-10 Mikkel Abrahamsen , Anna Adamaszek , Tillmann Miltzow

We prove that the classic 1994 Taito video game, known as Puzzle Bobble or Bust-a-Move, is NP-complete. Our proof applies to the perfect-information version where the bubble sequence is known in advance, and it uses just three bubble…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2015-07-10 Erik D. Demaine , Stefan Langerman

The Reward-Penalty-Selection Problem (RPSP) can be seen as a combination of the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and the Hitting Set Problem (HSP). Given a set of elements, a set of reward sets, and a set of penalty sets, one tries to find a subset…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-17 Niklas Gräf , Till Heller , Sven O. Krumke

By resorting to the vector space structure of finite games, skew-symmetric games (SSGs) are proposed and investigated as a natural subspace of finite games. First of all, for two player games, it is shown that the skew-symmetric games form…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-12-11 Yaqi Hao , Daizhan Cheng

We prove that persuasion is an NP-complete problem.

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Alban Grastien

We prove that finding an $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium is PPAD-complete for constant $\epsilon$ and a particularly simple class of games: polymatrix, degree 3 graphical games, in which each player has only two actions. As…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-09-14 Aviad Rubinstein

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…