Related papers: Solving Mahjong Solitaire boards with peeking
The solution set of a system of polynomial equations typically contains ill-behaved, singular points. Resolution is a fundamental process in geometry in which we replace singular points with smooth points, while keeping the rest of the…
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…
We propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
We solve the problem of one-dimensional peg solitaire. In particular, we show that the set of configurations that can be reduced to a single peg forms a regular language, and that a linear-time algorithm exists for reducing any…
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we continue the study of a prequel paper on the pile shuffle and its capabilities as a sorting device. We study two sort feasibility problems of…
We study the problems of covering or partitioning a polygon $P$ (possibly with holes) using a minimum number of small pieces, where a small piece is a connected sub-polygon contained in an axis-aligned unit square. For covering, we seek to…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
We show that the classical game LaserTank is $\mathrm{NP}$-complete, even when the tank movement is restricted to a single column and the only blocks appearing on the board are mirrors and solid blocks. We show this by reducing $3$-SAT…
We prove that the 2017 puzzle game ZHED is NP-complete, even with just 1 tiles. Such a puzzle is defined by a set of unit-square 1 tiles in a square grid, and a target square of the grid. A move consists of selecting an unselected 1 tile…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…
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.…
Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…
Recently M. Kreck introduced a class of stratified spaces called p-stratifolds [M. Kreck, Stratifolds, Preprint]. He defined and investigated resolutions of p-stratifolds analogously to resolutions of algebraic varieties. In this note we…
For a given nonnegative matrix $A=(A_{ij})$, the matrix scaling problem asks whether $A$ can be scaled to a doubly stochastic matrix $D_1AD_2$ for some positive diagonal matrices $D_1,D_2$.The Sinkhorn algorithm is a simple iterative…
Mahjong is a complex game with an intractably large state space with extremely sparse rewards, which poses challenges to develop an agent to play Mahjong. To overcome this, the ShangTing function was adopted as a reward shaping function.…
In this paper, we study the algorithmic complexity of the Mastermind game, where results are single-color black pegs. This differs from the usual dual-color version of the game, but better corresponds to applications in genetics. We show…
We propose a novel Linear Program (LP) based formula- tion for solving jigsaw puzzles. We formulate jigsaw solving as a set of successive global convex relaxations of the stan- dard NP-hard formulation, that can describe both jigsaws with…
A combinatorial simplex algorithm is an instance of the simplex method in which the pivoting depends on combinatorial data only. We show that any algorithm of this kind admits a tropical analogue which can be used to solve mean payoff…
The poset cover problem seeks a minimum set of partial orders whose linear extensions cover a given set of linear orders. Recognizing its NP-completeness, we devised a non-trivial reduction to the Boolean satisfiability problem using a…