Related papers: Depth in Bingo Closure
We analyze the computational complexity of Tetris clearing (determining whether the player can clear an initial board using a given sequence of pieces) and survival (determining whether the player can avoid losing before placing all the…
We initiate the study of a new variant of the Maker-Breaker positional game, which we call multistage game. Given a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}=(\mathcal{X},\mathcal{F})$ and a bias $b \ge 1$, the $(1:b)$ multistage Maker-Breaker game on…
Rikudo is a number-placement puzzle, where the player is asked to complete a Hamiltonian path on a hexagonal grid, given some clues (numbers already placed and edges of the path). We prove that the game is complete for NP, even if the…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
We investigate mushroom billiards, a class of dynamical systems with sharply divided phase space. For typical values of the control parameter of the system $\rho$, an infinite number of marginally unstable periodic orbits (MUPOs) exist…
We study the survival probability for long times in an open spherical billiard, extending previous work on the circular billiard. We provide details of calculations regarding two billiard configurations, specifically a sphere with a…
We provide a polynomial algorithm to find the value and an optimal strategy for a generalization of the Pig game. Modeled as a competitive Markov decision process, the corresponding Bellman equations can be decoupled leading to systems of…
There is an open set of right triangles such that for each irrational triangle in this set (i) periodic billiards orbits are dense in the phase space, (ii) there is a unique nonsingular perpendicular billiard orbit which is not periodic,…
A formal n-square is the set of positions in an square matrix of size n. A shuffle of a formal n-square consists of independent rotations of each row and of each column. A key result turns out to be valid at least for n <= 34 and n = 37:…
We investigate the game of peg solitaire on different board shapes, and find those of diamond or rhombus shape have interesting properties. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. Rhombus boards of side 6 have…
The boundary integral method (BIM) is a formulation of Helmholtz equation in the form of an integral equation suitable for numerical discretization to solve the quantum billiard. This paper is an extensive numerical survey of BIM in a…
We analyze a coin-based game with two players where, before starting the game, each player selects a string of length $n$ comprised of coin tosses. They alternate turns, choosing the outcome of a coin toss according to specific rules. As a…
A common problem to all applications of linear finite dynamical systems is analyzing the dynamics without enumerating every possible state transition. Of particular interest is the long term dynamical behaviour. In this paper, we study the…
Every positive integer may be written uniquely as a base-$\beta$ decomposition--that is a legal sum of powers of $\beta$--where $\beta$ is the dominating root of a non-increasing positive linear recurrence sequence. Guided by earlier work…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…
Sudoku is a famous logic puzzle where the player has to fill a number between 1 and 9 into each empty cell of a $9 \times 9$ grid such that every number appears exactly once in each row, each column, and each $3 \times 3$ block. In 2020,…
We provide two methodologies in the area of computation theory to solve optimal strategies for board games such as Xi Gua Qi and Go. From experimental results, we find relevance to graph theory, matrix representation, and mathematical…
Recall the classical 15-puzzle, consisting of 15 sliding blocks in a $4\times 4$ grid. Famously, the configuration space of this puzzle consists of two connected components, corresponding to the odd and even permutations of the symmetric…
A free-form Sudoku puzzle is a square arrangement of m times m cells such that the cells are partitioned into m subsets (called blocks) of equal cardinality. The goal of the puzzle is to place integers 1,...,m in the cells such that the…
We investigate binary voting systems with two types of voters and a hierarchy among the members in each type, so that members in one class have more influence or importance than members in the other class. The purpose of this paper is to…