Related papers: The Complexity of Rummikub Problems
We consider an assignment problem that has aspects of fair division as well as social choice. In particular, we investigate the problem of assigning a small subset from a set of indivisible items to multiple players so that the chosen…
The Rubix Cube is a 3-dimensional single-player combination puzzle attracting attention in the reinforcement learning community. A Rubix Cube has six faces and twelve possible actions, leading to a small and unconstrained action space and a…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and…
A cube is an 8-rep-tile: it is the union of eight smaller copies of itself. Is there a set with a hole which has this property? The computer found an interesting and complicated solution, which then could be simplified. We discuss some…
We study the complexity of solving two-player infinite duration games played on a fixed finite graph, where the control of a node is not predetermined but rather assigned randomly. In classic random-turn games, control of each node is…
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…
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…
Nim is a well-known combinatorial game in which two players alternately remove stones from distinct piles. A player who removes the last stone wins under the normal play rule, while a player loses under the mis\`ere play rule. In this…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…
A generally intelligent agent must be able to teach itself how to solve problems in complex domains with minimal human supervision. Recently, deep reinforcement learning algorithms combined with self-play have achieved superhuman…
We consider the task of computing an approximation of a trembling hand perfect equilibrium for an n-player game in strategic form, n >= 3. We show that this task is complete for the complexity class FIXP_a. In particular, the task is…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
The Game of Poker Chips, Dominoes and Survival fosters team building and high level cooperation in large groups, and is a tool applied in management training exercises. Each player, initially given two colored poker chips, is allowed to…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
In this paper we solve the three-player-game question. A three-player-game consists of a series of rounds. There are altogether three players. Two players participate in each round, at the end of the round the loser quits and the third…
The Sudoku puzzle has achieved worldwide popularity recently, and attracted great attention of the computational intelligence community. Sudoku is always considered as Satisfiability Problem or Constraint Satisfaction Problem. In this…
We consider an n-player symmetric stochastic game with weak interaction between the players. Time is continuous and the horizon and the number of states are finite. We show that the value function of each of the players can be approximated…
This paper considers a time-varying game with $N$ players. Every time slot, players observe their own random events and then take a control action. The events and control actions affect the individual utilities earned by each player. The…
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…