Related papers: Candy Crush is NP-hard

We show that the graph transformation problem of turning a simple graph into an Eulerian one by a minimum number of single edge switches is NP-hard. Further, we show that any simple Eulerian graph can be transformed into any other such…

We show that the problem of checking if a given nondeterministic parity automaton simulates another given nondeterministic parity automaton is NP-hard. We then adapt the techniques used for this result to show that the problem of checking…

We study the complexity of computing a uniform Nash equilibrium on a non-win-lose bimatrix game. It is known that such a problem is NP-complete even if a bimatrix game is win-lose (Bonifaci et al., 2008). Fortunately, if a win-lose bimatrix…

We study the complexity of computing stationary Nash equilibrium (NE) in n-player infinite-horizon general-sum stochastic games. We focus on the problem of computing NE in such stochastic games when each player is restricted to choosing a…

In the simplest game-theoretic formulation of Schelling's model of segregation on graphs, agents of two different types each select their own vertex in a given graph so as to maximize the fraction of agents of their type in their occupied…

In many applications, we want to influence the decisions of independent agents by designing incentives for their actions. We revisit a fundamental problem in this area, called GAME IMPLEMENTATION: Given a game in standard form and a set of…

We study the reachability problem for one-counter automata in which transitions can carry disequality tests. A disequality test is a guard that prohibits a specified counter value. This reachability problem has been known to be NP-hard and…

Weighted timed games are played by two players on a timed automaton equipped with weights: one player wants to minimise the accumulated weight while reaching a target, while the other has an opposite objective. Used in a reactive synthesis…

We continue the study of the covering complexity of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) initiated by Guruswami, H{\aa}stad and Sudan [SIAM J. Comp. 2002] and Dinur and Kol [CCC'13]. The covering number of a CSP instance $\Phi$ is the…

We investigate the class of regular-ordered word equations. In such equations, each variable occurs at most once in each side and the order of the variables occurring in both sides is the preserved (the variables can be, however, separated…

In this paper, we settle the open complexity status of interval constrained coloring with a fixed number of colors. We prove that the problem is already NP-complete if the number of different colors is 3. Previously, it has only been known…

We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…

The intractability of any problem and the randomness of its solutions have an obvious intuitive connection. However, the challenge till now has been that there is no practical way to firmly establish if the solution to a problem is actually…

We show that the quantum query complexity of evaluating NAND-tree instances with average choice complexity at most $W$ is $O(W)$, where average choice complexity is a measure of the difficulty of winning the associated two-player game. This…

We investigate a cops and robber game on directed graphs, where the robber moves along the arcs of the graph, while the cops can select any position at each time step. Our main focus is on the cop number: the minimum number of cops required…

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…

In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…

While 3-SAT is NP-hard, 2-SAT is solvable in polynomial time. Austrin, Guruswami, and H\r{a}stad roved a result known as "$(2+\varepsilon)$-SAT is NP-hard" [FOCS'14/SICOMP'17]. They showed that the problem of distinguishing k-CNF formulas…

Public goods games in undirected networks are generally known to have pure Nash equilibria, which are easy to find. In contrast, we prove that, in directed networks, a broad range of public goods games have intractable equilibrium problems:…

Suppose that a train is running along a railway network, starting from a designated origin, with the goal of reaching a designated destination. The network, however, is of a special nature: every time the train traverses a switch, the…