Related papers: Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble is NP-Complete
We prove that Strings-and-Coins -- the combinatorial two-player game generalizing the dual of Dots-and-Boxes -- is strongly PSPACE-complete on multigraphs. This result improves the best previous result, NP-hardness, argued in Winning Ways.…
We investigate the complexity of a puzzle that turns out to be NL-complete.
We play a variation of Nim on stacks of tokens. Take your favorite increasing sequence of positive integers and color the tokens according to the following rule. Each token on a level that corresponds to a number in the sequence is colored…
We analyze the computational complexity of the video game "CELESTE" and prove that solving a generalized level in it is NP-Complete. Further, we also show how, upon introducing a small change in the game mechanics (adding a new game…
A Neighborhood Balanced Coloring (NBC) of a graph is a red-blue coloring where each vertex has the same number of red and blue neighbors. This work proves that determining if a graph admits an NBC is NP-complete. We present a genetic…
Introducing the simplest of all No-Signalling Games: the RGB Game where two verifiers interrogate two provers, Alice and Bob, far enough from each other that communication between them is too slow to be possible. Each prover may be…
The $[X,Y]$-edge colouring game is played with a set of $k$ colours on a graph $G$ with initially uncoloured edges by two players, Alice (A) and Bob (B). The players move alternately. Player $X\in\{A,B\}$ has the first move.…
Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…
This note investigates the combinatorics of permutations underlying the NYT daily word game Waffle. It helps to solve Waffle games and helps to understand why some games are easy to solve while others are very hard. It shows that a perfect…
Holzer and Holzer (Discrete Applied Mathematics 144(3):345--358, 2004) proved that the Tantrix(TM) rotation puzzle problem is NP-complete. They also showed that for infinite rotation puzzles, this problem becomes undecidable. We study the…
Satisfiability checking for monotone modal logic is known to be (only) NP-complete. We show that this remains true when the logic is extended with aconjunctive and alternation-free fixpoint operators as well as the universal modality; the…
We are going to show that some variants of a puzzle called Pull in which the boxes have handles (i.e. we can only pull the boxes in certain directions) are NP-hard
The game of Paintbucket was recently introduced by Amundsen and Erickson. It is played on a rectangular grid of black and white pixels. The players alternately fill in one of their opponent's connected components with their own color, until…
In this note, a new puzzle is introduced where the pipe dream and bumpless pipe dream can be played simultaneously. Using these, a combinatorial proof of the (ordinary) Schubert polynomials in terms of bumpless pipe dream is given. The main…
Particle Dobble is an open-access, gamified learning tool designed to address persistent misconceptions in particle physics education by symbolically representing elements of the Standard Model. Aimed at upper secondary and introductory…
We analyze misere play of impartial tic-tac-toe---a game suggested by Bob Koca in which both players make X's on the board, and the first player to complete three-in-a-row loses. This game was recently discussed on mathoverflow.net in a…
In~[1],authors considered a general finite horizon model of dynamic game of asymmetric information, where N players have types evolving as independent Markovian process, where each player observes its own type perfectly and actions of all…
We show that, while Minesweeper is NP-complete, its hyperbolic variant is in P. Our proof does not rely on the rules of Minesweeper, but is valid for any puzzle based on satisfying local constraints on a graph embedded in the hyperbolic…
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…
A graph puzzle ${\rm Puz}(G)$ of a graph $G$ is defined as follows. A configuration of ${\rm Puz}(G)$ is a bijection from the set of vertices of a board graph to the set of vertices of a pebble graph, both graphs being isomorphic to some…