Related papers: Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble is NP-Complete
In this paper, we continue to consider the 2-dimensional (open) Toda system (Toda lattice) for $SU(N+1)$. We give a much more precise bubbling behavior of solutions and study its existence in some critical cases
We encounter mathematical problems in various forms in our lives, thus making mathematical thinking an important human ability. In this paper, we present Bublz!, a simple, click-driven game for children to engage in and develop mathematical…
We show that the minimization of visibly pushdown automata is NP-complete. This result is obtained by introducing immersions, that recognize multiple languages (over a usual, non-visible alphabet) using a common deterministic transition…
This paper suggests a perfect-information game, along the lines of Levy's characterization of Brownian motion, that formalizes the process of Brownian motion in game-theoretic probability. This is perhaps the simplest situation where…
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…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the well known tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) board game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields", each of them being a tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player…
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…
Bubbles is a fractal-like set related to a circle diffeomorphism; they are a complex analogue to Arnold tongues. In this article, we prove an approximate self-similarity of bubbles.
Plotting is a tile-matching puzzle video game published by Taito in 1989. Its objective is to reduce a given grid of coloured blocks down to a goal number or fewer. This is achieved by the avatar character repeatedly shooting the block it…
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
In combinatorial game theory, the winning player for a position in normal play is analyzed and characterized via algebraic operations. Such analyses define a value for each position, called a game value. A game (ruleset) is called universal…
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…
Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…
In this paper we study the computational complexity of the game of Scrabble. We prove the PSPACE-completeness of a derandomized model of the game, answering an open question of Erik Demaine and Robert Hearn.
Given a palette of six colors, a colored cube is a cube where each face is colored with exactly one color and each color appears on some face. Starting with an arbitrary collection of unit length colored cubes, one can try to arrange a…
In this work, we prove the NP-completeness of two variants of tokenisation, defined as the problem of compressing a dataset to at most $\delta$ symbols by either finding a vocabulary directly (direct tokenisation), or selecting a sequence…
We investigate the various time-dependent bubble spacetimes that can be obtained from double analytic continuation of asymptotically locally flat/AdS spacetimes with NUT charge. We find different time-dependent explicit solutions of general…
We study three problems related to the computational complexity of the popular game Minesweeper. The first is consistency: given a set of clues, is there any arrangement of mines that satisfies it? This problem has been known to be…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We analyze the computational complexity of several popular video games released for the Nintendo Game Boy video game console. We analyze the complexity of generalized versions of four popular Game Boy games: Donkey Kong, Wario Land, Harvest…