Related papers: Tatami Maker: A combinatorially rich mechanical ga…
Higher-dimensional orthogonal packing problems have a wide range of practical applications, including packing, cutting, and scheduling. Previous efforts for exact algorithms have been unable to avoid structural problems that appear for…
We develop some design examples for approximating a target surface at the final rigidly folded state of a developable quadrilateral creased paper, which is folded with a 1-DOF rigid folding motion from the planar state. The final rigidly…
We show that, by using multiplicative weights in a game-theoretic thought experiment (and an important convexity result on the composition of multiplicative weights with the relative entropy function), a symmetric bimatrix game (that is, a…
Building blocks and tiles are an excellent way of learning about geometry and mathematics in general. There are several versions of tiles that are either snapped together or connected with magnets that can be used to introduce topics like…
This study explores the use of origami composite structures as active aerodynamic control surfaces. Towards this goal, two origami concepts were designed leveraging a combination of analytical and finite element modeling, and computational…
This study proposes a reconfigurable modular building system that assembles multistable curved-crease origami blocks. Curved-crease origami is designed with even-vertex polygonal trajectories and an elastica curvature profile. We then…
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…
We define a general framework of partition games for formulating two-player pebble games over finite structures. We show that one particular such game, which we call the invertible-map game, yields a family of polynomial-time approximations…
It is well-known that the question of whether a given finite region can be tiled with a given set of tiles is NP-complete. We show that the same is true for the right tromino and square tetromino on the square lattice, or for the right…
We study a planning problem based on Plotting, a tile-matching puzzle video game published by Taito in 1989. The objective of this game is to remove a target number of coloured blocks from a grid by sequentially shooting blocks into the…
Consider a periodical (in two independent directions) tiling of the plane with polygons (faces). In this article we shall only give examples using squares, regular hexagons, equilateral triangles and parallelograms ("unions" of two…
We contribute results for a set of fundamental problems in the context of programmable matter by presenting algorithmic methods for evaluating and manipulating a collective of particles by a finite automaton that can neither store…
Combinatorial mechanical metamaterials feature spatially textured soft modes that yield exotic and useful mechanical properties. While a single soft mode often can be rationally designed by following a set of tiling rules for the building…
For the family of complex rational functions known as "Generalized McMullen maps", F(z) = z^n + a/z^n+b, for complex parameters a and b, with a nonzero, and any integer n at least 3 fixed, we reveal, and provide a combinatorial model for,…
In this century, a square-tiled translation surface (an origami) is intensively studied as an object with special properties of its translation structure and its $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$-orbit embedded in the moduli space. We generalize this…
We propose a new tournament structure that combines the popular knockout tournaments and the round-robin tournaments. As opposed to the extremes of divisive elimination and no elimination, our tournament aims to eliminate the participants…
The classical Maker-Breaker positional game is played on a board which is a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, with two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately claiming vertices of $\mathcal{H}$ until all the vertices are claimed. When the game…
Markov chains are an important example for a course on stochastic processes because simple board games can be used to illustrate the fundamental concepts. For example, a looping board game (like Monopoly) consists of all recurrent states,…
Developing cross-device multi-user interfaces (UIs) is a challenging problem. There are numerous ways in which content and interactivity can be distributed. However, good solutions must consider multiple users, their roles, their…
Thin elastic sheets bend easily and, if they are patterned with cuts, can deform in sophisticated ways. Here we show that carefully tuning the location and arrangement of cuts within thin sheets enables the design of mechanical actuators…