Related papers: Designing peg solitaire puzzles
String art is an arrangement of pegs on a board with thread strung between these pegs to form beautiful geometric patterns. In this article, we consider a simple form of string art where pegs are placed on two diverging axes, and segments…
Modern board games are a rich source of interesting and new challenges for combinatorial problems. The game Nmbr9 is a solitaire style puzzle game using polyominoes. The rules of the game are simple to explain, but modelling the game…
We consider a somehow peculiar Token/Bucket problem which at first sight looks confusing and difficult to solve. The winning approach to solve the problem consists in going back to the simple and traditional methods to solve computer…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
We indulge in what mathematicians call frivolous activities. In Arithmetic Billiards, a ball is bouncing around in a rectangle. In Parity Checkers we place checkers on a checkerboard under certain parity constraints. Both activities turn…
Academic literature retrieval is concerned with the selection of papers that are most likely to match a user's information needs. Most of the retrieval systems are limited to list-output models, in which the retrieval results are isolated…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
The author has long enjoyed using the CSP refinement checker FDR to solve puzzles, as witnessed by examples in \cite{tpc,ucs}. Recent experiments have shown that a number of games of patience (card games for one) are now well within bounds.…
In the $15$-puzzle game, $15$ labeled square tiles are reconfigured on a $4\times 4$ board through an escort, wherein each (time) step, a single tile neighboring it may slide into it, leaving the space previously occupied by the tile as the…
We give a simple proof of that determining solvability of Shisen-Sho boards is NP-complete. Furthermore, we show that under realistic assumptions, one can compute in logarithmic time if two tiles form a playable pair. We combine an…
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…
Finding all the words on a Boggle board is a classic computer programming problem. With a fast Boggle solver, local optimization techniques such as hillclimbing and simulated annealing can be used to find particularly high-scoring boards.…
This paper presents a novel construction method for symmetric Sudoku-type games based on Lee distance perfect codes and diameter perfect codes. The proposed method utilizes the tiling property of these codes to define the structure of the…
In this paper we propose the first effective automated, genetic algorithm (GA)-based jigsaw puzzle solver. We introduce a novel procedure of merging two "parent" solutions to an improved "child" solution by detecting, extracting, and…
We investigate a type of a Sudoku variant called Sudo-Kurve, which allows bent rows and columns, and develop a new, yet equivalent, variant we call a Sudo-Cube. We examine the total number of distinct solution grids for this type with or…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…
In combinatorial reconfiguration, the reconfiguration problems on a vertex subset (e.g., an independent set) are well investigated. In these problems, some tokens are placed on a subset of vertices of the graph, and there are three natural…
We present a novel method for solving square jigsaw puzzles based on global optimization. The method is fully automatic, assumes no prior information, and can handle puzzles with known or unknown piece orientation. At the core of the…
We will describe a combinatorial game that models the problem of resolution of singularities of algebraic varieties over a field of characteristic zero. By giving a winning strategy for this game, we give another proof of the existence of…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…