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Combinatorial problems arising in puzzles, origami, and (meta)material design have rare sets of solutions, which define complex and sharply delineated boundaries in configuration space. These boundaries are difficult to capture with…
Su-Doku, a popular combinatorial puzzle, provides an excellent testbench for heuristic explorations. Several interesting questions arise from its deceptively simple set of rules. How many distinct Su-Doku grids are there? How to find a…
Rigid origami has shown potential in large diversity of practical applications. However, current rigid origami crease pattern design mostly relies on known tessellations. This strongly limits the diversity and novelty of patterns that can…
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…
This paper introduces a computational composite material comprising layers for actuation, computation and energy storage. Key to its design is inexpensive materials assembled from traditionally available fabrication machines to support the…
In areas as diverse as contemporary art, play structures, climbing equipment, and modular construction toys, we see the presence of building block-like polyhedral complexes, which are generalizations of the pieces in the game Tetris. We…
Modern board games are a rich source of interesting and new challenges for combinatorial problems. The game Nmbr9 is a solitaire style puzzle game using polyominoes. The rules of the game are simple to explain, but modelling the game…
The field of rigid origami concerns the folding of stiff, inelastic plates of material along crease lines that act like hinges and form a straight-line planar graph, called the crease pattern of the origami. Crease pattern vertices in the…
The tiling problem has been a famous problem that has appeared in many Mathematics problems. Many of its solutions are rooted in high-level Mathematics. Thus we hope to tackle this problem using more elementary Mathematics concepts. In this…
The author has long enjoyed using the CSP refinement checker FDR to solve puzzles, as witnessed by examples in \cite{tpc,ucs}. Recent experiments have shown that a number of games of patience (card games for one) are now well within bounds.…
The $\mathscr{P}$-position sets of some combinatorial games have special combinatorial structures. For example, the $\mathscr{P}$-position set of the hexad game, first investigated by Conway and Ryba, is the block set of the Steiner system…
Serious games have recently emerged as an avenue for curriculum delivery. Serious games incorporate motivation and entertainment while providing pointed curriculum for the user. This paper presents a serious game, called MiBoard, currently…
A combinatorial tiling of the sphere is naturally given by an embedded graph. We study the case that each tile has exactly five edges, with the ultimate goal of classifying combinatorial tilings of the sphere by geometrically congruent…
The structural complexity of metamaterials is limitless, although in practice, most designs comprise periodic architectures which lead to materials with spatially homogeneous features. More advanced tasks, arising in e.g. soft robotics,…
We propose a generalization of positional games, supplementing them with a restriction on the order in which the elements of the board are allowed to be claimed. We introduce poset positional games, which are positional games with an…
Inspired by the allure of additive fabrication, we pose the problem of origami design from a new perspective: how can we grow a folded surface in three dimensions from a seed so that it is guaranteed to be isometric to the plane? We solve…
Game maps are useful for human players, general-game-playing agents, and data-driven procedural content generation. These maps are generally made by hand-assembling manually-created screenshots of game levels. Besides being tedious and…
We prove that the number of monomer-dimer tilings of an $n\times n$ square grid, with $m<n$ monomers in which no four tiles meet at any point is $m2^m+(m+1)2^{m+1}$, when $m$ and $n$ have the same parity. In addition, we present a new proof…
We present an algebraic framework for the analysis of combinatorial games. This framework embraces the classical theory of partizan games as well as a number of misere games, comply-constrain games, and card games that have been studied…
The recent development of modular origami structures has ushered in a new era for active metamaterials with multiple degrees of freedom (multi-DOF). Notably, no systematic inverse design approach for volumetric modular origami structures…