Related papers: The Complexity of Rummikub Problems

Mahjong is a very popular tile-based game commonly played by four players. Each player begins with a hand of 13 tiles and, in turn, players draw and discard (i.e., change) tiles until they complete a legal hand using a 14th tile. In this…

Many animals, and an increasing number of artificial agents, display sophisticated capabilities to perceive and manipulate objects. But human beings remain distinctive in their capacity for flexible, creative tool use -- using objects in…

We investigate the game of peg solitaire on different board shapes, and find those of diamond or rhombus shape have interesting properties. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. Rhombus boards of side 6 have…

The game of nim, with its simple rules, its elegant solution and its historical importance is the quintessence of a combinatorial game, which is why it led to so many generalizations and modifications. We present a modification with a new…

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…

The tile-based multiplayer game Mahjong is widely played in Asia and has also become increasingly popular worldwide. Face-to-face or online, each player begins with a hand of 13 tiles and players draw and discard tiles in turn until they…

In the game of Scrabble, letter tiles are drawn uniformly at random from a bag. The variability of possible draws as the game progresses is a source of variation that makes it more likely for an inferior player to win a head-to-head match…

This paper presents a systematic method to solve difficult 9 x 9 Sudoku puzzles by hand. While computer algorithms exist to solve these puzzles, these algorithms are not good for human's to use because they involve too many steps and…

The power of symbolic computation, as opposed to mere numerical computation, is illustrated with efficient algorithms for studying the generalized gambler's ruin problem in one and two dimensions. We also consider a new generalization of…

Tablut is a complete-knowledge, deterministic, and asymmetric board game, which has not been solved nor properly studied yet. In this work, its rules and characteristics are presented, then a study on its complexity is reported. An upper…

In this paper we study a cooperative card game called Hanabi from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. In Hanabi, each card has one among $c$ colors and a number between $1$ and $n$. The aim is to make, for each color, a…

In repeated games, players choose actions concurrently at each step. We consider a parameterized setting of repeated games in which the players form a population of an arbitrary size. Their utility functions encode a reachability objective.…

The tiling problem has been a famous problem that has appeared in many Mathematics problems. Many of its solutions are rooted in high-level Mathematics. Thus we hope to tackle this problem using more elementary Mathematics concepts. In this…

This paper investigates the problems arising in the construction of a program to play the game of contract bridge. These problems include both the difficulty of solving the game's perfect information variant, and techniques needed to…

The 13-card variant of Classic Indian Rummy is a sequential game of incomplete information that requires probabilistic reasoning and combinatorial decision-making. This paper proposes a rule-based framework for strategic play, driven by a…

The game of Nim, which has been well known for many years, has numerous variations. One such variation is Circular Nim, where piles of stones are arranged on a circumference, and players take stones from consecutive adjacent piles in one…

We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…

Rubik's Cube is one of the most famous combinatorial puzzles involving nearly $4.3 \times 10^{19}$ possible configurations. Its mathematical description is expressed by the Rubik's group, whose elements define how its layers rotate. We…

Gomoku, also known as five in a row, is a classical board game, ideally suited for quickly testing novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. With the aim of facilitating a developer willing to write a new Gomoku player, in this report…

We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…