Related papers: Tatami Maker: A combinatorially rich mechanical ga…
We present an additive approach for the inverse design of kirigami-based mechanical metamaterials by focusing on the empty (negative) spaces instead of the solid tiles. By considering each negative space as a four-bar linkage, we identify a…
It has been known since 1996 that deciding whether a collection of creases on a piece of paper can be fully folded flat without causing self-intersection or adding new creases is an NP-Hard problem (Bern and Hayes). In their proof, a binary…
Traditional robotic manipulator design methods require extensive, time-consuming, and manual trial and error to produce a viable design. During this process, engineers often spend their time redesigning or reshaping components as they…
In this work, we study a triangular variant of the Lights Out game, proposed in the 2025 Capixaba Mathematics Olympiad. We present a combinatorial description of the game, formally characterize its operations, and introduce the notion of a…
Domineering is a two-player game played on a checkerboard in which one player places dominoes vertically, while the other places them horizontally. In this paper, we find out the minimum number of moves for a game of Domineering to end on…
One-dimensional slender bodies can be deformed or shaped into spatially complex curves relatively easily due to their inherent compliance. However, traditional methods of fabricating complex spatial shapes are cumbersome, prone to error…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…
We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…
The manuscript studies configurations of non-overlapping non-bonding dominoes on finite rectangular boards of unit squares characterized by row and column number. The non-bonding dominoes are defined here by the requirement that any domino…
In this work, we propose an optimization approach for constructing various classes of circulant combinatorial designs that can be defined in terms of autocorrelations. The problem is formulated as a so-called feasibility problem having…
Mutual imitation games among artificial birds are studied. By employing a variety of mappings and game rules, the evolution to the edge between chaos and windows is universally confirmed. Some other general features are observed, including…
This paper introduces a collection of board games specifically chosen to serve as a basis for programming exercises. We examine the attractiveness of board games in this context as well as features that make a particular game a good…
Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…
We present and analyze PackIt!, a turn-based game consisting of packing rectangles on an $n \times n$ grid. PackIt! can be easily played on paper, either as a competitive two-player game or in \emph{solitaire} fashion. On the $t$-th turn, a…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
We introduce a topological combinatorial game called the Region Smoothing Swap Game. The game is played on a game board derived from the connected shadow of a link diagram on a (possibly non-orientable) surface by smoothing at crossings.…
A combinatorial substitution is a map over tilings which allows to define sets of tilings with a strong hierarchical structure. In this paper, we show that such sets of tilings are sofic, that is, can be enforced by finitely many local…
Several articles deal with tilings with various shapes, and also a very frequent type of combinatorics is to examine the walks on graphs or on grids. We combine these two things and give the numbers of the shortest walks crossing the tiled…
This study starts from the counter-intuitive question of how we can render a conventional stiff, non-stretchable and even brittle material conformable so that it can fully wrap around a curved surface, such as a sphere, without failure.…
By using two different invariants for the Rubik's Magic puzzle, one of metric type, the other of topological type, we can dramatically reduce the universe of constructible configurations of the puzzle. Finding the set of actually…