Related papers: Unshuffling a Square is NP-Hard
We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 3D. The puzzle, inspired by the game PushPush, consists of unit square blocks on an integer lattice. An agent may push blocks (but never pull them) in attempting to move…
A square is a factor $S = (S_1; S_2)$ where $S_1$ and $S_2$ have the same pattern, and a permutation is said to be square-free if it contains no non-trivial squares. The permutation is further said to be bicrucial if every extension to the…
This paper is concerned with the problem of finding $n$ distinct squares such that, on excluding any one of them, the sum of the remaining $n-1$ squares is a square. While parametric solutions are known when $n=3$ and $n=4$, when $n > 4$,…
We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 2D, improving an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99]. The puzzle, inspired by the game *PushPush*, consists of unit square blocks on an integer…
A pattern p (i.e., a string of variables and terminals) matches a word w, if w can be obtained by uniformly replacing the variables of p by terminal words. The respective matching problem, i.e., deciding whether or not a given pattern…
In the Maximum Duo-Preservation String Mapping problem we are given two strings and wish to map the letters of the former to the letters of the latter so as to maximise the number of duos. A duo is a pair of consecutive letters that is…
We study the following combinatorial problem. Given a set of $n$ y-monotone curves, which we call wires, a tangle determines the order of the wires on a number of horizontal layers such that any two consecutive layers differ only in swaps…
Mixed-integer quadratic programming is the problem of optimizing a quadratic function over points in a polyhedral set where some of the components are restricted to be integral. In this paper, we prove that the decision version of…
We study the complexity of the problem of searching for a set of patterns that separate two given sets of strings. This problem has applications in a wide variety of areas, most notably in data mining, computational biology, and in…
Let $\Sigma$ be an alphabet. For two strings $X$, $Y$, and a constrained string $P$ over the alphabet $\Sigma$, the constrained longest common subsequence and substring problem for two strings $X$ and $Y$ with respect to $P$ is to find a…
This note investigates the combinatorics of permutations underlying the NYT daily word game Waffle. It helps to solve Waffle games and helps to understand why some games are easy to solve while others are very hard. It shows that a perfect…
This paper investigates the computational complexity of deciding whether the vertices of a graph can be partitioned into a disjoint union of cliques and a triangle-free subgraph. This problem is known to be $\NP$-complete on arbitrary…
Here we study the complexity of string problems as a function of the size of a program that generates input. We consider straight-line programs (SLP), since all algorithms on SLP-generated strings could be applied to processing…
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…
Computing an optimal chain of fragments is a classical problem in string algorithms, with important applications in computational biology. There exist two efficient dynamic programming algorithms solving this problem, based on different…
We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…
It is shown that from two strings that are partially random and independent (in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity) it is possible to effectively construct polynomially many strings that are random and pairwise independent. If the two…
We prove that it is NP-complete to decide whether a given string can be factored into palindromes that are each unique in the factorization.
A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…
There are two methods for counting the number of occurrences of a string in another large string. One is to count the number of places where the string is found. The other is to determine how many pieces of string can be extracted without…