Related papers: Designing peg solitaire puzzles
This article is concerned with an example of complex planar geometry arising from flat origami challenges. The complexity of solution algorithms is illustrated, depending on the depth of the initial analysis of the problem, starting from…
We create a new two-player game on the Sperner Triangle based on Sperner's lemma. Our game has simple rules and several desirable properties. First, the game is always certain to have a winner. Second, like many other interesting games such…
We show that the Minesweeper game is PP-hard, when the object is to locate all mines with the highest probability. When the probability of locating all mines may be infinitesimal, the Minesweeper game is even PSPACE-complete. In our…
Dialogue games are two-player logic games between a Proponent who puts forward a logical formula A as valid or true and an Opponent who disputes this. An advantage of the dialogical approach is that it is a uniform framework from which…
This work explores the relationship between solution space and time complexity in the context of the $\textbf{P}$ vs. $\textbf{NP}$ problem, particularly through the lens of the sliding tile puzzle and root finding algorithms. We focus on…
We propose a novel mathematical framework to address the problem of automatically solving large jigsaw puzzles. This problem assumes a large image, which is cut into equal square pieces that are arbitrarily rotated and shuffled, and asks to…
The proposed approach is to formalise the probabilistic puzzle in equational FOL. Two formalisations are needed: one theory for all models of the given puzzle, and a second theory for the favorable models. Then Mace4 - that computes all the…
This paper suggests a forward-pruning technique for computer chess that uses 'Move Tables', which are like Transposition Tables, but for moves not positions. They use an efficient memory structure and has put the design into the context of…
Since the advent of computers, many tasks which required humans to spend a lot of time and energy have been trivialized by the computers' ability to perform repetitive tasks extremely quickly. Playing chess is one such task. It was one of…
Dots-and-Boxes is a popular children's game whose winning strategies have been studied by Berlekamp, Conway, Guy, and others. In this article we consider two variations, Dots-and-Triangles and Dots-and-Polygons, both of which utilize the…
A Sudoku puzzle often has a regular pattern in the arrangement of initial digits and it is typically made solvable with known solving techniques, called strategies. In this paper, we consider the problem of generating such Sudoku instances.…
Mathematics has been used in the exploration and enumeration of juggling patterns. In the case when we catch and throw one ball at a time the number of possible juggling patterns is well-known. When we are allowed to catch and throw any…
Morpion Solitaire is a pencil-and-paper game for a single player. A move in this game consists of putting a cross at a lattice point and then drawing a line segment that passes through exactly five consecutive crosses. The objective is to…
Skill mastery is a priority for success in all fields. We present a parallel between the development of skill mastery and the process of solving jigsaw puzzles. We show that iterative random sampling solves jigsaw puzzles in two phases: a…
In this paper we demonstrate a method for counting the number of solutions to various logic puzzles. Specifically, we remove all of the "clues" from the puzzle which help the solver to a unique solution, and instead start from an empty…
We introduce a new board game based on the ancient Chinese game of Go (Weiqi, Igo, Baduk). The key difference from the original game is that players no longer alternatively play single stones on the board but instead they take turns placing…
The Monty Hal problem is an attractive puzzle. It combines simple statement with answers that seem surprising to most audiences. The problem was thoroughly solved over two decades ago. Yet, more recent discussions indicate that the solution…
This paper investigates the popular card game UNO from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. We define simple and concise mathematical models for the game, including both cooperative and uncooperative versions, and analyze…
Probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) are powerful tools for solving systems of complex relationships over a variety of probability distributions. However, while tree-structured PGMs always result in efficient and exact solutions, inference…
We consider a stochastic version of Bulgarian solitaire: A number of cards are distributed in piles; in every round a new pile is formed by cards from the old piles, and each card is picked independently with a fixed probability. This game…