Related papers: The "Game about Squares" is NP-hard

We analyze Solo Chess puzzles, where the input is an $n \times n$ board containing some standard Chess pieces of the same color, and the goal is to make a sequence of capture moves to reduce down to a single piece. Prior work analyzes this…

We prove that the 2017 puzzle game ZHED is NP-complete, even with just 1 tiles. Such a puzzle is defined by a set of unit-square 1 tiles in a square grid, and a target square of the grid. A move consists of selecting an unselected 1 tile…

We expand the theory of pebbling to graphs with weighted edges. In a weighted pebbling game, one player distributes a set amount of weight on the edges of a graph and his opponent chooses a target vertex and places a configuration of…

We continue the investigation of finite-duration variants of infinite-duration games by extending known results for games played on finite graphs to those played on infinite ones. In particular, we establish an equivalence between pushdown…

Many puzzle video games, like Sokoban, involve moving some agent in a maze. The reachable locations are usually apparent for a human player, and the difficulty of the game is mainly related to performing actions on objects, such as pushing…

We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…

Roughly speaking, gerrymandering is the systematic manipulation of the boundaries of electoral districts to make a specific (political) party win as many districts as possible. While typically studied from a geographical point of view,…

Temporal graphs are a popular modelling mechanism for dynamic complex systems that extend ordinary graphs with discrete time. Simply put, time progresses one unit per step and the availability of edges can change with time. We consider the…

Given a fixed graph $H$ and a positive integer $n$, a Picker-Chooser $H$-game is a biased game played on the edge set of $K_n$ in which Picker is trying to force many copies of $H$ and Chooser is trying to prevent him from doing so. In this…

Edge-matching problems, also called edge matching puzzles, are abstractions of placement problems with neighborhood conditions. Pieces with colored edges have to be placed on a board such that adjacent edges have the same color. The problem…

Consider an undirected graph modeling a social network, where the vertices represent users, and the edges do connections among them. In the competitive diffusion game, each of a number of players chooses a vertex as a seed to propagate…

Swish is a card game in which players are given cards having symbols (hoops and balls), and find a valid superposition of cards, called a "swish." Dailly, Lafourcade, and Marcadet (FUN 2024) studied a generalized version of Swish and showed…

Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player games with a reachability objective. The basic question asks whether one player can ensure reaching a given target with at least a given probability. A natural extension is games with a…

In this paper, we present a board game: Square War. The game definition of Square War is similar to the classic Chinese board game Go. Then we propose a mathematical problem of the game Square War. Finally, we show that the problem can be…

We show that, in John Conway's board game Phutball (or Philosopher's Football), it is NP-complete to determine whether the current player has a move that immediately wins the game. In contrast, the similar problems of determining whether…

We introduce and study pawn games, a class of two-player zero-sum turn-based graph games. A turn-based graph game proceeds by placing a token on an initial vertex, and whoever controls the vertex on which the token is located, chooses its…

This paper intends to solve the Transversal achievement on an n times n grid problem proposed by Dr. Martin Erickson. We approach the problem using mathematical induction and case analysis and prove the hypothesis that for all n greater…

This paper investigates why and when the edge-based districting problem becomes computationally intractable. The overall problem is represented as an exact mathematical programming formulation consisting of an objective function and several…

The UNIQUE GAMES problem is a central problem in algorithms and complexity theory. Given an instance of UNIQUE GAMES, the STRONG UNIQUE GAMES problem asks to find the largest subset of vertices, such that the UNIQUE GAMES instance induced…

The paper focuses on two problems: (i) how to orient the edges of an undirected graph in order to maximize the number of ordered vertex pairs (x,y) such that there is a directed path from x to y, and (ii) how to orient the edges so as to…