Related papers: Hardness of Mastermind
Although most reinforcement learning research has centered on competitive games, little work has been done on applying it to co-operative multiplayer games or text-based games. Codenames is a board game that involves both asymmetric…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
The author has long enjoyed using the CSP refinement checker FDR to solve puzzles, as witnessed by examples in \cite{tpc,ucs}. Recent experiments have shown that a number of games of patience (card games for one) are now well within bounds.…
Graph Exploration problems ask a searcher to explore an unknown environment. The environment is modeled as a graph, where the searcher needs to visit each vertex beginning at some vertex. Treasure Hunt problems are a variation of Graph…
Using well-known mathematical problems for encryption is a widely used technique because they are computationally hard and provide security against potential attacks on the encryption method. The subset sum problem (SSP) can be defined as…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
The Decodoku project seeks to let users get hands-on with cutting-edge quantum research through a set of simple puzzle games. The design of these games is explicitly based on the problem of decoding qudit variants of surface codes. This…
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…
Pairwise compatibility measure (CM) is a key component in solving the jigsaw puzzle problem (JPP) and many of its recently proposed variants. With the rapid rise of deep neural networks (DNNs), a trade-off between performance (i.e.,…
This paper introduces a new paradigm for minimax game-tree search algo- rithms. MT is a memory-enhanced version of Pearls Test procedure. By changing the way MT is called, a number of best-first game-tree search algorithms can be simply and…
The alpha-beta pruning algorithms have been popular in game tree searching ever since they were discovered. Numerous enhancements are proposed in literature and it is often overwhelming as to which would be the best for implementation. A…
Cohn and Umans proposed a framework for developing fast matrix multiplication algorithms based on the embedding computation in certain groups algebras. In subsequent work with Kleinberg and Szegedy, they connected this to the search for…
When learning to code, students often develop misconceptions about various programming language concepts. These can not only lead to bugs or inefficient code, but also slow down the learning of related concepts. In this paper, we introduce…
Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 by Michael Paterson and John Conway. The game starts with p spots, lasts at most 3p-1 moves, and the player who makes the last move wins. In the misere version of Sprouts, on the…
Machine learning relies on the assumption that unseen test instances of a classification problem follow the same distribution as observed training data. However, this principle can break down when machine learning is used to make important…
Our ignorance of the winnability percentage of the solitaire card game `Klondike' has been described as ``one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics''. Klondike, the game in the Windows Solitaire program, is just one of many…
The logic MMSNP is a well-studied fragment of Existential Second-Order logic that, from a computational perspective, captures finite-domain Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) modulo polynomial-time reductions. At the same time, MMSNP…
How can we generate a permutation of the numbers $1$ through $n$ so that it is hard to guess the next element given the history so far? The twist is that the generator of the permutation (the ``Dealer") has limited memory, while the…
Common knowledge is crucial for safe group coordination. In its absence, humans must rely on shared knowledge, which is inherently limited in depth and therefore prone to coordination failures, because any finite-order knowledge attribution…
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…