Related papers: The computational complexity of Minesweeper
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…
MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables in a Bayesian network given some evidence. Unlike computing posterior probabilities, or MPE (a special case of MAP), the time and space complexity of…
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…
We introduce a near-linear complexity (geometric and meshless/algebraic) multigrid/multiresolution method for PDEs with rough ($L^\infty$) coefficients with rigorous a-priori accuracy and performance estimates. The method is discovered…
The Reward-Penalty-Selection Problem (RPSP) can be seen as a combination of the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and the Hitting Set Problem (HSP). Given a set of elements, a set of reward sets, and a set of penalty sets, one tries to find a subset…
Let $(X, \mathcal{F})$ be a hypergraph. The Maker-Breaker game on $(X, \mathcal{F})$ is a combinatorial game between two players, Maker and Breaker. Beginning with Maker, the players take turns claiming vertices from $X$ that have not yet…
In repeated games, players choose actions concurrently at each step. We consider a parameterized setting of repeated games in which the players form a population of an arbitrary size. Their utility functions encode a reachability objective.…
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 study two positional games played on hypergraphs, whose edges may be interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex of the hypergraph. We say a player fills an edge if that player has picked all…
This project investigates the potential of computers to solve complex tasks such as games. The paper proves that the complexity of a generalized version of spider solitaire is NP-Complete and uses much of structure of the proof that…
The complexity class $PSPACE$ includes all computational problems that can be solved by a classical computer with polynomial memory. All $PSPACE$ problems are known to be solvable by a quantum computer too with polynomial memory and are,…
We demonstrate that Col is PSPACE-complete on triangular grid graphs via a reduction from Bounded Two-Player Constraint Logic. This is the most structured graph family that Col is known to be computationally hard for.
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…
Games on graphs provide a natural and powerful model for reactive systems. In this paper, we consider generalized reachability objectives, defined as conjunctions of reachability objectives. We first prove that deciding the winner in such…
Mastermind is in essence a search problem in which a string of symbols that is kept secret must be found by sequentially playing strings that use the same alphabet, and using the responses that indicate how close are those other strings to…
Amazons is a board game which combines elements of Chess and Go. It has become popular in recent years, and has served as a useful platform for both game-theoretic study and AI games research. Buro showed that simple Amazons endgames are…
The Parks Puzzle is a paper-and-pencil puzzle game that is classically played on a square grid with different colored regions (the parks). The player needs to place a certain number of "trees" in each row, column, and park such that none…
Given Markov chains and Markov decision processes (MDPs) whose transitions are labelled with non-negative integer costs, we study the computational complexity of deciding whether the probability of paths whose accumulated cost satisfies a…
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…
In this study, we investigate the computational complexity of some variants of generalized puzzles. We are provided with two sets S_1 and S_2 of polyominoes. The first puzzle asks us to form the same shape using polyominoes in S_1 and S_2.…