Related papers: On the Complexity of Slide-and-Merge Games
We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…
The 2048 game involves tiles labeled with powers of two that can be merged to form bigger powers of two; variants of the same puzzle involve similar merges of other tile values. We analyze the maximum score achievable in these games by…
The twentieth century has seen the rise of a new type of video games targeted at a mass audience of "casual" gamers. Many of these games require the player to swap items in order to form matches of three and are collectively known as…
Tetravex is a widely played one person computer game in which you are given $n^2$ unit tiles, each edge of which is labelled with a number. The objective is to place each tile within a $n$ by $n$ square such that all neighbouring edges are…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
2048 is a stochastic single-player game involving 16 cells on a 4 by 4 grid, where a player chooses a direction among up, down, left, and right to obtain a score by merging two tiles with the same number located in neighboring cells along…
Matching games naturally generalize assignment games, a well-known class of cooperative games. Interest in matching games has grown recently due to some breakthrough results and new applications. This state-of-the-art survey provides an…
In areas as diverse as contemporary art, play structures, climbing equipment, and modular construction toys, we see the presence of building block-like polyhedral complexes, which are generalizations of the pieces in the game Tetris. We…
Simple games cover voting systems in which a single alternative, such as a bill or an amendment, is pitted against the status quo. A simple game or a yes-no voting system is a set of rules that specifies exactly which collections of ``yea''…
The game of SET is one of the best mathematical games ever. It is no wonder that people have tried to generalize it. We discuss existing generalizations of the game of SET to different groups. We concentrate on two types of generalization:…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and…
By resorting to the vector space structure of finite games, skew-symmetric games (SSGs) are proposed and investigated as a natural subspace of finite games. First of all, for two player games, it is shown that the skew-symmetric games form…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
2048 is a single-player stochastic puzzle game. This intriguing and addictive game has been popular worldwide and has attracted researchers to develop game-playing programs. Due to its simplicity and complexity, 2048 has become an…
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
We revisit the complexity of deciding, given a {\it bimatrix game,} whether it has a {\it Nash equilibrium} with certain natural properties; such decision problems were early known to be ${\mathcal{NP}}$-hard~\cite{GZ89}. We show that…
We analyze the computational complexity of two 2-player games involving packing objects into a box. In the first game, players alternate drawing polycubes from a shared pile and placing them into an initially empty box in any available…
In recent years, reinforcement learning has seen interest because of deep Q-Learning, where the model is a convolutional neural network. Deep Q-Learning has shown promising results in games such as Atari and AlphaGo. Instead of learning the…