Related papers: Ice sliding games
Lights Out! is a game played on a $5 \times 5$ grid of lights, or more generally on a graph. Pressing lights on the grid allows the player to turn off neighboring lights. The goal of the game is to start with a given initial configuration…
As robot make their way out of factories into human environments, outer space, and beyond, they require the skill to manipulate their environment in multifarious, unforeseeable circumstances. With this regard, pushing is an essential motion…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
We report on progress in modelling and solving Puzznic, a video game requiring the player to plan sequences of moves to clear a grid by matching blocks. We focus here on levels with no moving blocks. We compare a planning approach and three…
Dynamic zero-sum games are an important class of problems with applications ranging from evasion-pursuit and heads-up poker to certain adversarial versions of control problems such as multi-armed bandit and multiclass queuing problems.…
We consider Flipping Coins, a partizan version of the impartial game Turning Turtles, played on lines of coins. We show the values of this game are numbers, and these are found by first applying a reduction, then decomposing the position…
We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…
This paper investigates the geometrical properties of real world games (e.g. Tic-Tac-Toe, Go, StarCraft II). We hypothesise that their geometrical structure resemble a spinning top, with the upright axis representing transitive strength,…
Moves in chess games are usually analyzed on a case-by-case basis by professional players, but thanks to the availability of large game databases, we can envision another approach of the game. Here, we indeed adopt a very different point of…
The labyrinth game is a simple yet challenging platform, not only for humans but also for control algorithms and systems. The game is easy to understand but still very hard to master. From a system point of view, the ball behaviour is in…
This paper presents a game theoretic formulation of a graph traversal problem, with applications to robots moving through hazardous environments in the presence of an adversary, as in military and security scenarios. The blue team of robots…
This paper examines two different variants of the Ludo game, involving multiple dice and a fixed number of total turns. Within each variant, multiple game lengths (total no. of turns) are considered. To compare the two variants, a set of…
We have studied a spatially extended snowdrift game, in which the players are located on the sites of two-dimensional square lattices and repeatedly have to choose one of the two strategies, either cooperation (C) or defection (D). A player…
Learning to program has become common in schools, higher education and individual learning. Although testing is an important aspect of programming, it is often neglected in education due to a perceived lack of time and knowledge, or simply…
The 'Cheating Robot' version of Cops and Robbers is played on a finite, simple, connected graph. The players move in the same time period. However, before moving, the robot observes to which vertices the cops are moving and it is fast…
Sprouts is a two-player topological game, invented in 1967 by Michael Paterson and John Conway. The game starts with p spots drawn on a sheet of paper, and lasts at most 3p-1 moves: the player who makes the last move wins. Sprouts is a very…
Speedrunning in general means to play a video game fast, i.e. using all means at one's disposal to achieve a given goal in the least amount of time possible. To do so, a speedrun must be planned in advance, or routed, as referred to by the…
We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 2D, improving an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99]. The puzzle, inspired by the game *PushPush*, consists of unit square blocks on an integer…
The friction of a stationary moving skate on smooth ice is investigated, in particular in relation to the formation of a thin layer of water between skate and ice. It is found that the combination of ploughing and sliding gives a friction…
Pushing is a motion primitive useful to handle objects that are too large, too heavy, or too cluttered to be grasped. It is at the core of much of robotic manipulation, in particular when physical interaction is involved. It seems…