Related papers: Unshuffling a Square is NP-Hard
This paper proves that arrangement of music is NP-hard when subject to various constraints: avoiding musical dissonance, limiting how many notes can be played simultaneously, and limiting transition speed between chords. These results imply…
We show that any permutation of ${1,2,...,N}$ can be written as the product of two involutions. As a consequence, any permutation of the elements of an array can be performed in-place in parallel in time O(1). In the case where the…
The paper presents a simple, linear time, in-place algorithm for performing a 2-way in-shuffle which can be used with little modification for certain other k-way shuffles.
We consider string matching with variable length gaps. Given a string $T$ and a pattern $P$ consisting of strings separated by variable length gaps (arbitrary strings of length in a specified range), the problem is to find all ending…
Many consensus string problems are based on Hamming distance. We replace Hamming distance by the more flexible (e.g., easily coping with different input string lengths) dynamic time warping distance, best known from applications in time…
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…
We describe a new non-constructive technique to show that squares are avoidable by an infinite word even if we force some letters from the alphabet to appear at certain occurrences. We show that as long as forced positions are at distance…
The binary string matching problem consists in finding all the occurrences of a pattern in a text where both strings are built on a binary alphabet. This is an interesting problem in computer science, since binary data are omnipresent in…
Magic squares have been an enthralling topic in mathematics for centuries. They are formed by filling in all the cells of a square matrix with the numbers starting from one so that the sum of all rows, columns, and diagonals is the same.…
For each $\Pi^0_1$ $S\subseteq \mathbb{N}$, let the $S$-square shift be the two-dimensional subshift on the alphabet $\{0,1\}$ whose elements consist of squares of 1s of various sizes on a background of 0s, where the side length of each…
In the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds shuffle, a deck of $N$ cards is cut into two approximately equal parts which are then riffled uniformly at random. Bayer and Diaconis famously showed that this Markov chain undergoes cutoff in total variation…
A square trisection is a problem of assembling three identical squares from a larger square, using a minimal number of pieces. This paper presents an historical overview of the square trisection problem starting with its origins in the…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
We consider the problem of binary string reconstruction from the multiset of its substring compositions, i.e., referred to as the substring composition multiset, first introduced and studied by Acharya et al. We introduce a new algorithm…
We study the problem of cutting a length-$n$ string of positive real numbers into $k$ pieces so that every piece has sum at least $b$. The problem can also be phrased as transforming such a string into a new one by merging adjacent numbers.…
A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain non-empty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over $3$-letter alphabet. We consider a new type of square-free words. A…
In card games, in casino games with multiple decks of cards and in cryptography, one is sometimes faced with the following problem: how can a human (as opposed to a computer) shuffle a large deck of cards? The procedure we study is to break…
Card-based cryptography uses physical playing cards to construct protocols for secure multi-party computation. Existing card-based protocols employ various types of shuffles, some of which are easy to implement in practice while others are…
We analyze the mixing time of a popular shuffling machine known as the shelf shuffler. It is a modified version of a $2m$-handed riffle shuffle ($m=10$ in casinos) in which a deck of $n$ cards is split multinomially into $2m$ piles, the…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…