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

We introduce a two-player game in which one and his/her opponent attempt to pack as many ``prisoners'' as possible on the squares of an n-by-n checkerboard; each prisoner has to be ``protected'' by at least as many guards as the number of…

We prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether two points in a polygonal domain with holes can be connected by a wire. This implies that finding any approximation to the shortest path for a long snake amidst polygonal obstacles is NP-hard.…

This study examines the computational complexity of the decision problem modeled on the smartphone game Bus Out. The objective of the game is to load all the passengers in a queue onto appropriate buses using a limited number of bus parking…

This work is concerned with the study of the Game of Graph Nim -- a class of two-player combinatorial games -- on graphs with $4$ edges. To each edge of such a graph is assigned a positive-integer-valued edge-weight, and during each round…

We consider the recently introduced knotting-unknotting game, in which two players take turns resolving crossings in a knot diagram which initially is missing all its crossing information. Once the knot is fully resolved, the winner is…

We consider the problem of determining the minimum number of moves needed to solve a certain one-dimensional peg puzzle. Let N be a positive integer. The puzzle apparatus consists of a block with a single row of 2N+1 equally spaced holes…

During the last twenty years, a lot of research was conducted on the sport elimination problem: Given a sports league and its remaining matches, we have to decide whether a given team can still possibly win the competition, i.e., place…

We propose a class of two person perfect information games based on weighted graphs. One of these games can be described in terms of a round pizza which is cut radially into pieces of varying size. The two players alternately take pieces…

We study the puzzle game Buttons and Scissors in which the goal is to remove all buttons from an $n\times m$ grid by a series of horizontal and vertical cuts. We show that the corresponding parameterized problem has an algorithm with time…

Observable games are game situations that reach one of possibly many Nash equilibria. Before an instance of the game starts, an external observer does not know, a priori, what is the exact profile of actions that will occur; thus, he…

In this paper we study a variant of the solitaire game Lights-Out, where the player's goal is to turn off a grid of lights. This variant is a two-player impartial game where the goal is to make the final valid move. This version is playable…

Given a finite family of squares in the plane, the packing problem asks for the maximum number $\nu$ of pairwise disjoint squares among them, while the hitting problem for the minimum number $\tau$ of points hitting all of them. Clearly,…

Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we continue the study of a prequel paper on the pile shuffle and its capabilities as a sorting device. We study two sort feasibility problems of…

We study the complexity of computing equilibria in binary public goods games on undirected graphs. In such a game, players correspond to vertices in a graph and face a binary choice of performing an action, or not. Each player's decision…

We introduce the following variant of the Gale-Berlekamp switching game. Let $P$ be a set of n noncollinear points in the plane, each of them having weight $+1$ or $-1$. At each step, we pick a line $\ell$ passing through at least two…

We investigate two types of query games played on a graph, pair queries and edge queries. We concentrate on investigating the two associated graph parameters for binomial random graphs, and showing that determining any of the two parameters…

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…

We analyse the computational complexity of finding Nash equilibria in turn-based stochastic multiplayer games with omega-regular objectives. We show that restricting the search space to equilibria whose payoffs fall into a certain interval…

Using the notion of visibility representations, our paper establishes a new property of instances of the Nondeterministic Constraint Logic (NCL) problem (a PSPACE-complete problem that is very convenient to prove the PSPACE-hardness of…

The ordinary game of Nim has a long history and is well-known in the area of combinatorial game theory. The solution to the ordinary game of Nim has been known for many years and lends itself to numerous other solutions to combinatorial…