Related papers: Cookie Monster Devours Naccis
This paper extends the work started in 2002 by Demaine, Demaine and Verill (DDV) on coin-moving puzzles. These puzzles have a long history in the recreational literature, but were first systematically analyzed by DDV, who gave a full…
Allcock constructed a 13-dimensional complex ball quotient of which he conjectured that it admits a natural covering with covering group isomorphic to the Bimonster. This ball quotient contains the moduli space of cubic threefolds as an…
Consider the following puzzle: a farmland consists of several fields, each occupied by either a farmer, a fox, a chicken, or a caterpillar. Creatures in neighboring fields can swap positions as long as the fox avoids the farmer, the chicken…
In this note, we provide evidence for new (super) moonshines relating the Monster and the Baby monster to some weakly holomorphic weight 1/2 modular forms defined by Zagier in his work on traces of singular moduli. They are similar in…
A monster is an automaton in which every function from states to states is represented by at least one letter. A modifier is a set of functions allowing one to transform a set of automata into one automaton. We revisit some language…
The Rubix Cube is a 3-dimensional single-player combination puzzle attracting attention in the reinforcement learning community. A Rubix Cube has six faces and twelve possible actions, leading to a small and unconstrained action space and a…
This recreational mathematics article shows that the game of Snakes and Ladders is intransitive: square 69 has a winning edge over 79, which in turn beats 73, which beats 69. Analysis of the game is a nice illustration of Markov chains,…
This paper deals with a problem in which two players share a previously sliced pizza and try to eat as much amount of pizza as they can. It takes time to eat each piece of pizza and both players eat pizza at the same rate. One is allowed to…
In this paper, we address a natural question at the intersection of combinatorial game theory and computational complexity: "Can a sum of simple tepid games in canonical form be intractable?" To resolve this fundamental question, we…
The Decodoku project seeks to let users get hands-on with cutting-edge quantum research through a set of simple puzzle games. The design of these games is explicitly based on the problem of decoding qudit variants of surface codes. This…
The author has constructed and enumerated tours of knight having various magic properties on 4 x n and 6 x n boards. 16 magic tours of knight have been discovered on 4 x 18 board, 88 on 4 x 20 board, 464 on 4 x 22 board, 2076 on 4 x 24…
We count permutations avoiding a nonconsecutive instance of a two- or three-letter pattern, that is, the pattern may occur but only as consecutive entries in the permutation. Two-letter patterns give rise to the Fibonacci numbers. The…
Everyone learns to code nowadays. Writing code, however, does not go without testing, which unfortunately rarely seems to be taught explicitly. Testing is often not deemed important enough or is just not perceived as sufficiently exciting.…
We consider a sequential inspection game where an inspector uses a limited number of inspections over a larger number of time periods to detect a violation (an illegal act) of an inspectee. Compared with earlier models, we allow varying…
We prove that any diagram of the unknot with c crossings may be reduced to the trivial diagram using at most (236 c)^{11} Reidemeister moves. Moreover, every diagram in this sequence has at most (7 c)^2 crossings. We also prove a similar…
Pebble games are used to study space/time trade-offs. Recently, spooky pebble games were introduced to study classical space / quantum space / time trade-offs for simulation of classical circuits on quantum computers. In this paper, the…
In a previous article, we reduced the unsolved problem of the convergence of Collatz sequences, to convergence of Collatz sequences of odd numbers, that are divisible by 3. In this article, we further reduce this set to odd numbers that are…
This paper is a sharp and focussed exploration of the Fibonacci substitution and the mathematical entity it gives rise to, the Fibonacci word. Our investigations are both of an algebraic and a geometric nature. Indeed, it is the combination…
We investigate a coin-weighing puzzle that appeared in the all-Russian math Olympiad in 2000. We liked the puzzle because the methods of analysis differ from classical coin-weighing puzzles. We generalize the puzzle by varying the number of…
In this paper, we perform a minimalistic quantization of the classical game of tic-tac-toe, by allowing superpositions of classical moves. In order for the quantum game to reduce properly to the classical game, we require legal quantum…