Related papers: Zen Puzzle Garden is NP-complete
In the $15$-puzzle game, $15$ labeled square tiles are reconfigured on a $4\times 4$ board through an escort, wherein each (time) step, a single tile neighboring it may slide into it, leaving the space previously occupied by the tile as the…
We prove that it is NP-complete to decide whether a given (3-dimensional) simplicial complex is collapsible. This work extends a result of Malgouyres and Franc\'{e}s showing that it is NP-complete to decide whether a given simplicial…
The $P$ versus $NP$ problem is still unsolved. But there are several oracles with $P$ unequal $NP$ relative to them. Here we will prove, that $P\not=NP$ relative to a $P$-complete oracle. In this paper, we use padding arguments as the proof…
Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this…
Computing the real solutions to a system of polynomial equations is a challenging problem, particularly verifying that all solutions have been computed. We describe an approach that combines numerical algebraic geometry and sums of squares…
Exactly 20 years ago at MFCS, Demaine posed the open problem whether the game of Dots & Boxes is PSPACE-complete. Dots & Boxes has been studied extensively, with for instance a chapter in Berlekamp et al. "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical…
Mastermind game is a two players zero sum game of imperfect information. The first player, called codemaker, chooses a secret code and the second player, called codebreaker, tries to break the secret code by making as few guesses as…
We analyze the computational complexity of two 2-player games involving packing objects into a box. In the first game, players alternate drawing polycubes from a shared pile and placing them into an initially empty box in any available…
We complete the characterization of the computational complexity of equilibrium in public goods games on graphs. In this model, each vertex represents an agent deciding whether to produce a public good, with utility defined by a…
In this paper, we present a board game: Square War. The game definition of Square War is similar to the classic Chinese board game Go. Then we propose a mathematical problem of the game Square War. Finally, we show that the problem can be…
We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
Using the notion of visibility representations, our paper establishes a new property of instances of the Nondeterministic Constraint Logic (NCL) problem (a PSPACE-complete problem that is very convenient to prove the PSPACE-hardness of…
Ball sort puzzle is a popular logic puzzle consisting of several bins containing balls of multiple colors. Each bin works like a stack; a ball has to follow the last-in first-out order. The player has to sort the balls by color such that…
We prove that in the Game of Life, if the thickness-four zero-padding of a rectangular pattern is not an orphan, then the corresponding finite-support configuration is not a Garden of Eden, and that the preimage of every finite-support…
Finite-horizon probabilistic multiagent concurrent game systems, also known as finite multiplayer stochastic games, are a well-studied model in computer science due to their ability to represent a wide range of real-world scenarios…
This paper proves that push-pull block puzzles in 3D are PSPACE-complete to solve, and push-pull block puzzles in 2D with thin walls are NP-hard to solve, settling an open question by Zubaran and Ritt. Push-pull block puzzles are a type of…
We consider extensive games with perfect information with well-founded game trees and study the problems of existence and of characterization of the sets of subgame perfect equilibria in these games. We also provide such characterizations…
We demonstrate a polynomial approach to express the decision version of the directed Hamiltonian Cycle Problem (HCP), which is NP-Complete, as the Solvability of a Polynomial Equation with a constant number of variables, within a bounded…
A game is rigid if a near-optimal score guarantees, under the sole assumption of the validity of quantum mechanics, that the players are using an approximately unique quantum strategy. Rigidity has a vital role in quantum cryptography as it…