Related papers: Spot it(R) Solitaire
The game "Spot It!" is played with a deck of cards in which every pair of cards has exactly one matching symbol and the aim is to be the fastest at finding the match. It is known that finite projective planes correspond to decks in which…
We discuss four famous card games that can help learn linear algebra. The games are: SET, Socks, Spot it!, and EvenQuads. We describe the game in the language of vector, affine, and projective spaces. We also show how these games are…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire played on a computer. Two popular board shapes are the 33-hole cross-shaped board, and the 15-hole triangle board---we use them as examples throughout. The basic game begins from a full board…
We first prove that solving Mahjong Solitaire boards with peeking is NP-complete, even if one only allows isolated stacks of the forms /aab/ and /abb/. We subsequently show that layouts of isolated stacks of heights one and two can always…
"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…
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…
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…
Peg solitaire is an old puzzle with a 300 year history. We consider two ways a computer can be utilized to find interesting peg solitaire puzzles. It is common for a peg solitaire puzzle to begin from a symmetric board position, we have…
When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…
We investigate the game of peg solitaire on different board shapes, and find those of diamond or rhombus shape have interesting properties. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. Rhombus boards of side 6 have…
Morpion Solitaire is a pencil-and-paper game for a single player. A move in this game consists of putting a cross at a lattice point and then drawing a line segment that passes through exactly five consecutive crosses. The objective is to…
The game of tic-tac-toe is well known. In particular, in its classic version it is famous for being unwinnable by either player. While classically it is played on a grid, it is natural to consider the effect of playing the game on richer…
In this paper we present the results from a program developed by the author that finds the unitals of the known 193 projective planes of order 25.. There are several planes for which we have not found any unital. One or more than one…
Skat is a fascinating combinatorial card game, show-casing many of the intrinsic challenges for modern AI systems such as cooperative and adversarial behaviors (among the players), randomness (in the deal), and partial knowledge (due to…
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…
The Searchlight Scheduling Problem was first studied in 2D polygons, where the goal is for point guards in fixed positions to rotate searchlights to catch an evasive intruder. Here the problem is extended to 3D polyhedra, with the guards…
This paper studies the game of guessing riffle-shuffled cards with complete feedback. A deck of $n$ cards labelled 1 to $n$ is riffle-shuffled once and placed on a table. A player tries to guess the cards from top and is given complete…
The 21-card trick is a way of dealing cards in order to predict the card selected by a volunteer. We give a mathematical explanation of why the well-known 21-card trick works using a simple linear discrete function. The function has a…