Related papers: The computational complexity of Minesweeper

The Hanano Puzzle is a one-player game with irreversible gravity, where the goal is to make colored blocks make contact with flowers of the corresponding color. The game Jelly no Puzzle shares similar mechanics. In general, determining if a…

Itemset mining is one of the most studied tasks in knowledge discovery. In this paper we analyze the computational complexity of three central itemset mining problems. We prove that mining confident rules with a given item in the head is…

The Honey-Bee game is a two-player board game that is played on a connected hexagonal colored grid or (in a generalized setting) on a connected graph with colored nodes. In a single move, a player calls a color and thereby conquers all the…

We consider the computational complexity of winning this turn (mate-in-1 or "finding lethal") in Hearthstone as well as several other single turn puzzle types introduced in the Boomsday Lab expansion. We consider three natural…

The computational complexity of the partition, 0-1 subset sum, unbounded subset sum, 0-1 knapsack and unbounded knapsack problems and their multiple variants were studied in numerous papers in the past where all the weights and profits were…

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…

We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…

In this paper, we study a two-stage stochastic version of the assignment game, which is a fundamental cooperative game. Given an initial setting, the set of players may change in the second stage according to some probability distribution,…

Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…

We revisit a classical crossword filling puzzle which already appeared in Garey\&Jonhson's book. We are given a grid with $n$ vertical and horizontal slots and a dictionary with $m$ words and are asked to place words from the dictionary in…

Avoidance games are games in which two players claim vertices of a hypergraph and try to avoid some structures. These games are studied since the introduction of the game of SIM in 1968, but only few complexity results are known on them. In…

We revisit the coalition structure generation problem in which the goal is to partition the players into exhaustive and disjoint coalitions so as to maximize the social welfare. One of our key results is a general polynomial-time algorithm…

We consider a probabilistic version of the depth-first search on mazes with two exits, and show that this algorithm has equal probability of finding either exit. The proof is combinatorial and uses an explicit involution.

The Maker-Maker convention of positional games is played on a hypergraph whose edges are interpreted as winning sets. Two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex, aiming at being first to pick all the vertices of some edge.…

The study of SAT and its variants has provided numerous NP-complete problems, from which most NP-hardness results were derived. Due to the NP-hardness of SAT, adding constraints to either specify a more precise NP-complete problem or to…

Hive is an abstract strategy game played on a table with hexagonal pieces. First published in 2001, it was and continues to be highly popular among both casual and competitive players. In this paper, we show that for a suitably generalized…

We investigate the combinatorial game Slime Trail.This game is played on a graph with a starting piece in a node. Each player's objective is to reach one of their own goal nodes. Every turn the current player moves the piece and deletes the…

The Generalized Sliding-Tile Puzzle (GSTP), allowing many square tiles on a board to move in parallel while enforcing natural geometric collision constraints on the movement of neighboring tiles, provide a high-fidelity mathematical model…

Bloxorz is an online puzzle game where players move a 1 by 1 by 2 block by tilting it on a subset of the two dimensional grid. Bloxorz features switches that open and close trapdoors. The puzzle is to move the block from its initial…

One of the most appealing aspects of the (coarse) correlated equilibrium concept is that natural dynamics quickly arrive at approximations of such equilibria, even in games with many players. In addition, there exist polynomial-time…