Related papers: A handle is enough for a hard game of Pull
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…
This paper studies complexity theoretic aspects of quantum refereed games, which are abstract games between two competing players that send quantum states to a referee, who performs an efficiently implementable joint measurement on the two…
We investigate the reconfiguration of $n$ blocks, or "tokens", in the square grid using "line pushes". A line push is performed from one of the four cardinal directions and pushes all tokens that are maximum in that direction to the…
In games with imperfect recall, players may forget the sequence of decisions they made in the past. When players also forget whether they have already encountered their current decision point, they are said to be absent-minded. Solving…
We present three versions of the classic two-pile game \textsc{one-or-one-or-one-of-both} generalized to the multi-pile context. In each case, we explore the resulting $\mathcal{P}$-positions. In the first version, there is a simple…
Given a chain of $HW$ cubes where each cube is marked "turn $90^\circ$" or "go straight", when can it fold into a $1 \times H \times W$ rectangular box? We prove several variants of this (still) open problem NP-hard: (1) allowing some cubes…
We identify a choiceless variation of the box game paradox, in which players predict unknown real numbers with near-perfect accuracy despite lacking any useful information. We also verify that choice is necessary in the solution of the…
In this paper we evaluate how constructive heuristics degrade when a problem transits from P to NP-hard. This is done by means of the linear ordering problem. More specifically, for this problem we prove that the objective function can be…
Snake is a classic computer game, which has been around for decades. Based on this game, we study the game of Snake on arbitrary undirected graphs. A snake forms a simple path that has to move to an apple while avoiding colliding with…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
In this paper we study the complexity of strategic argumentation for dialogue games. A dialogue game is a 2-player game where the parties play arguments. We show how to model dialogue games in a skeptical, non-monotonic formalism, and we…
In this paper we discusses the relationship between the known classes P and NP. We show that the difficulties in solving problem "P versus NP" have methodological in nature. An algorithm for solving any problem is sensitive to even small…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes. We…
0-1 Knapsack is a fundamental NP-complete problem. In this article we prove that it remains NP-complete even when the weights of the objects in the packing constraints and their values in the objective function satisfy specific stringent…
In this paper we introduce polytopal stochastic games, an extension of two-player, zero-sum, turn-based stochastic games, in which we may have uncertainty over the transition probabilities. In these games the uncertainty over the…
Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…
In an amalgamation Nim, players are allowed to use a move from the traditional form of Nim or to amalgamate two piles when they are not empty. No formula that describes the set of P-positions of Amalgamation Nim is known. The author gives a…
In this paper, we give a formal definition of the popular word-guessing game Wordle. We show that, in general, determining if a given Wordle instance admits a winning strategy is NP-complete. We also show that given a Wordle instance of…
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…