Related papers: Hardness of Mastermind
Very recently, a long-standing open question proposed by Bodlaender in 1991 was answered: the graph coloring game is PSPACE-complete. In 2019, Andres and Lock proposed five variants of the graph coloring game and left open the question of…
In this work, we consider the problem of secure multi-party computation (MPC), consisting of $\Gamma$ sources, each has access to a large private matrix, $N$ processing nodes or workers, and one data collector or master. The master is…
We analyze Solo Chess puzzles, where the input is an $n \times n$ board containing some standard Chess pieces of the same color, and the goal is to make a sequence of capture moves to reduce down to a single piece. Prior work analyzes this…
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…
An input to the Popular Matching problem, in the roommates setting, consists of a graph $G$ and each vertex ranks its neighbors in strict order, known as its preference. In the Popular Matching problem the objective is to test whether there…
Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are ubiquitous in theoretical computer science. We study the problem of StrongCSPs, i.e. instances where a large induced sub-instance has a satisfying assignment. More formally, given a CSP instance…
Deep neural models have repeatedly proved excellent at memorizing surface patterns from large datasets for various ML and NLP benchmarks. They struggle to achieve human-like thinking, however, because they lack the skill of iterative…
Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of applications of deep neural networks towards solving tasks that require superior cognitive abilities, e.g., playing Go, generating art, ChatGPT, etc. Such a dramatic progress raises the…
This paper proposes \emph{knowledge-based paraonoia search} (KBPS) to find forced wins during trick-taking in the card game Skat; for some one of the most interesting card games for three players. It combines efficient partial information…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
In this paper, we resolve the computational complexity of a number of outstanding open problems with practical applications. Here is the list of problems we show to be PPAD-complete, along with the domains of practical significance:…
A sliding puzzle is a combination puzzle where a player slide pieces along certain routes on a board to reach a certain end-configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel measurement of complexity of massive sliding puzzles with…
The success of language models has inspired the NLP community to attend to tasks that require implicit and complex reasoning, relying on human-like commonsense mechanisms. While such vertical thinking tasks have been relatively popular,…
Here we study the complexity of string problems as a function of the size of a program that generates input. We consider straight-line programs (SLP), since all algorithms on SLP-generated strings could be applied to processing…
Consider the following puzzle: a farmland consists of several fields, each occupied by either a farmer, a fox, a chicken, or a caterpillar. Creatures in neighboring fields can swap positions as long as the fox avoids the farmer, the chicken…
This paper investigates a class of games with large strategy spaces, motivated by challenges in AI alignment and language games. We introduce the hidden game problem, where for each player, an unknown subset of strategies consistently…
In this paper, we present Demystify, a general tool for creating human-interpretable step-by-step explanations of how to solve a wide range of pen and paper puzzles from a high-level logical description. Demystify is based on Minimal…
This paper provides a complexity analysis for the game of reconnaissance blind chess (RBC), a recently-introduced variant of chess where each player does not know the positions of the opponent's pieces a priori but may reveal a subset of…
We study a game puzzle that has enjoyed recent popularity among mathematicians, computer scientist, coding theorists and even the mass press. In the game, $n$ players are fitted with randomly assigned colored hats. Individual players can…