Related papers: Designing peg solitaire puzzles
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 introduce a computational origami problem which we call the segment folding problem: given a set of $n$ line-segments in the plane the aim is to make creases along all segments in the minimum number of folding steps. Note that a folding…
A square trisection is a problem of assembling three identical squares from a larger square, using a minimal number of pieces. This paper presents an historical overview of the square trisection problem starting with its origins in the…
Learning visual features from unlabeled image data is an important yet challenging task, which is often achieved by training a model on some annotation-free information. We consider spatial contexts, for which we solve so-called jigsaw…
We discuss some old common knowledge puzzles and introduce a lot of new common knowledge puzzles.
Decades of research have been invested in making computer programs for playing games such as Chess and Go. This paper focuses on a new game, Tetris Link, a board game that is still lacking any scientific analysis. Tetris Link has a large…
Learning to act in unstructured environments, such as cluttered piles of objects, poses a substantial challenge for manipulation robots. We present a novel neural network-based approach that separates unknown objects in clutter by selecting…
Constraint problems can be trivially solved in parallel by exploring different branches of the search tree concurrently. Previous approaches have focused on implementing this functionality in the solver, more or less transparently to the…
The problem of searching a polygonal region for an unpredictably moving intruder by a set of stationary guards, each carrying an orientable laser, is known as the Searchlight Scheduling Problem. Determining the computational complexity of…
We investigate solutions to the new "Ziggu" family of exponential puzzles. These puzzles have $p$ pieces that form $m$ mazes. We encode the puzzle state as an quaternary number (base $4$) with $n=m+1$ digits, where each digit gives the…
Pebble games were extensively studied in the 1970s and 1980s in a number of different contexts. The last decade has seen a revival of interest in pebble games coming from the field of proof complexity. Pebbling has proven to be a useful…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
In this paper, we study the concept of "binary color-coded magic squares" by assigning two distinct colors to the even and odd numbers within a magic square. We investigate the uniqueness of patterns within these squares using three…
We prove that the classic falling-block video game Tetris (both survival and board clearing) remains NP-complete even when restricted to 8 columns, or to 4 rows, settling open problems posed over 15 years ago [BDH+04]. Our reduction is from…
Juggling patterns can be described by a sequence of cards which keep track of the relative order of the balls at each step. This interpretation has many algebraic and combinatorial properties, with connections to Stirling numbers, Dyck…
In the "Game about Squares" the task is to push unit squares on an integer lattice onto corresponding dots. A square can only be moved into one given direction. When a square is pushed onto a lattice point with an arrow the direction of the…
We solve the classical "Game of Pure Strategy" using linear programming. We notice an intricate even-odd behavior in the results of our computations, that seems to encourage odd or maximal bids.
The super edge-magicness of graphs of equal order and size has been shown to be important since such graphs can be used as seeds to answer many questions related to (super) edge-magic labelings and other types of well studied labelings, as…
In this paper, we study some cards shuffles which are used by magicians. We focus ourselves on the possibility to hit eventually the initial state after several shuffles. This is a classical problem arising in discrete dynamical systems.…
The composite plate problem is an eigenvalue optimization problem related to the fourth order operator $(-\Delta)^2$. In this paper we continue the study started in [10], focusing on symmetry and rigidity issues in the case of the hinged…