Related papers: On an error in the star puzzle by Henry E. Dudeney
Determining the state-space complexity of the game of Shogi (Japanese Chess) has been a challenging problem, with previous combinatorial estimates leaving a gap of five orders of magnitude ($10^{64}$ to $10^{69}$). This large gap arises…
We introduce a very simple solitaire game, named Stanley Solitaire, in honor of Richard Stanley, and prove an explicit closed-form formula for the number of ways of playing it. Alas, the only proof that we know is via a deep theorem of…
In this paper we answer a question posed by R. Stanley in his collection of Bijection Proof Problems (Problem 240). We present a bijective proof for the enumeration of walks of length $k$ a chess rook can move along on an $m\times n$ board…
A king in a directed graph is a vertex $v$ such that every other vertex is reachable from $v$ via a path of length at most $2$. It is well known that every tournament (a complete graph where each edge has a direction) has at least one king.…
We show that it is possible to use a quantum walk to find a path from one marked vertex to another. In the specific case of $M$ stars connected in a chain, one can find the path from the first star to the last one in $O(M\sqrt{N})$ steps,…
Conway Checkers is a game played with a checker placed in each square of the lower half of an infinite checkerboard. Pieces move by jumping over an adjacent checker, removing the checker jumped over. Conway showed that it is not possible to…
Over the last decade, Sudoku, a combinatorial number-placement puzzle, has become a favorite pastimes of many all around the world. In this puzzle, the task is to complete a partially filled $9 \times 9$ square with numbers 1 through 9,…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…
We describe computer searches that prove the graph reconstruction conjecture for graphs with up to 13 vertices and some limited classes on larger sizes. We also investigate the reconstructibility of tournaments up to 13 vertices, digraphs…
How many moves does it take to solve Rubik's Cube? Positions are known that require 20 moves, and it has already been shown that there are no positions that require 27 or more moves; this is a surprisingly large gap. This paper describes a…
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 $m \times n$ king graph consists of all locations on an $m \times n$ chessboard, where edges are legal moves of a chess king. %where each vertex represents a square on a chessboard and each edge is a legal move. Let $P_{m \times n}(z)$…
A king in a directed graph is a node from which each node in the graph can be reached via paths of length at most two. There is a broad literature on tournaments (completely oriented digraphs), and it has been known for more than half a…
The recently introduced path-star task is a minimal task designed to exemplify limitations to the abilities of language models (Bachmann and Nagarajan, 2024). It involves a path-star graph where multiple arms radiate from a single starting…
Discrepancy measures how uniformly distributed a point set is with respect to a given set of ranges. There are two notions of discrepancy, namely continuous discrepancy and combinatorial discrepancy. Depending on the ranges, several…
We study the following variant of the 15 puzzle. Given a graph and two token placements on the vertices, we want to find a walk of the minimum length (if any exists) such that the sequence of token swappings along the walk obtains one of…
Spiral Galaxies is a pencil-and-paper puzzle played on a grid of unit squares: given a set of points called centers, the goal is to partition the grid into polyominoes such that each polyomino contains exactly one center and is 180{\deg}…
The sudoku minimum number of clues problem is the following question: what is the smallest number of clues that a sudoku puzzle can have? For several years it had been conjectured that the answer is 17. We have performed an exhaustive…
The systemic velocity or redshift of galaxies is a convenient tool to calculate their distances in the absence of primary methods, but the uncertainties on these flow distances may be substantial due to galaxy peculiar motions. Here, we…