Related papers: On an error in the star puzzle by Henry E. Dudeney
We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…
The star discrepancy $D_N^*(\mathcal{P})$ is a quantitative measure for the irregularity of distribution of a finite point set $\mathcal{P}$ in the multi-dimensional unit cube which is intimately related to the integration error of…
Consider a curve $\Gamma$ in a domain $D$ in the plane $\boldsymbol R^2$. Thinking of $D$ as a piece of paper, one can make a curved folding $P$ in the Euclidean space $\boldsymbol R^3$. The singular set $C$ of $P$ as a space curve is…
In this short note we prove that every tournament contains the $k$-th power of a directed path of linear length. This improves upon recent results of Yuster and of Gir\~ao. We also give a complete solution for this problem when $k=2$,…
Consider $n$ points evenly spaced on a circle, and a path of $n-1$ chords that uses each point once. There are $m=\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ possible chord lengths, so the path defines a multiset of $n-1$ elements drawn from $\{1,2,\ldots,m\}$.…
Subset take-away is a two-player game involving a fixed finite set A. Players alternate choosing a proper, non-empty subset of A, with the condition that one may not name a set containing a set that was named earlier. A player unable to…
We introduce a two player game on an n x n chessboard where queens are placed by alternating turns on a chessboard square whose availability is determined by the number of queens already on the board which can attack that square modulo two.…
Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn (1851-1922) presented a model for the distribution of stars in space together with a dynamical interpretation in terms of an equilibrium between the gravitational field of the stars and their random motion and…
The author presents two tricks to accelerate depth-first search algorithms for a class of combinatorial puzzle problems, such as tiling a tray by a fixed set of polyominoes. The first trick is to implement each assumption of the search with…
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…
In their seminal work, Danzer (1956, 1986) and Stach\'{o} (1981) established that every set of pairwise intersecting disks in the plane can be stabbed by four points. However, both these proofs are non-constructive, at least in the sense…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
We introduce higher-dimensional cubical sliding puzzles that are inspired by the classical 15 Puzzle from the 1880s. In our puzzles, on a $d$-dimensional cube, a labeled token can be slid from one vertex to another if it is topologically…
We introduce QUEENS, a derivative chess problem based on the classical n-queens problem. We prove that QUEENS is NP-complete, with respect to polynomial-time reductions.
A star-simple drawing of a graph is a drawing in which adjacent edges do not cross. In contrast, there is no restriction on the number of crossings between two independent edges. When allowing empty lenses (a face in the arrangement induced…
A chessboard has the property that every row and every column has as many white squares as black squares. In this mostly methodological note, we address the problem of counting such rectangular arrays with a fixed (numeric) number of rows,…
J. J. Sylvester's four-point problem asks for the probability that four points chosen uniformly at random in the plane have a triangle as their convex hull. Using a combinatorial classification of points in the plane due to Goodman and…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
A tournament is an orientation of a complete graph. A vertex that can reach every other vertex within two steps is called a \emph{king}. We study the complexity of finding $k$ kings in a tournament graph. We show that the randomized query…
After the existence proof of the first remarkably stable simple choreographic motion-- the figure eight of the planar three-body problem by Chenciner and Montgomery in 2000, a great number of simple choreographic solutions have been…