Related papers: The Mutando of Insanity
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…
A normal edge-coloring of a cubic graph is a proper edge-coloring, in which every edge is adjacent to edges colored with four distinct colors or to edges colored with two distinct colors. It is conjectured that $5$ colors suffice for a…
An incidence of a graph $G$ is a pair $(u,e)$ where $u$ is a vertex of $G$ and $e$ is an edge of $G$ incident with $u$. Two incidences $(u,e)$ and $(v,f)$ of $G$ are adjacent whenever (i) $u=v$, or (ii) $e=f$, or (iii) $uv=e$ or $uv=f$. An…
In this paper we study the Three Hat Problem which appeared in Puzzle Corner of the Technology Review magazine. This puzzle gives a scenario in which three players wearing hats are sitting together and each hat can be seen by everyone…
Square coloring is a variant of graph coloring where vertices within distance two must receive different colors. When considering planar graphs, the most famous conjecture (Wegner, 1977) states that $\frac32\Delta+1$ colors are sufficient…
A perfect coloring (equivalent concepts are equitable partition and partition design) of a graph $G$ is a function $f$ from the set of vertices onto some finite set (of colors) such that every node of color $i$ has exactly $S(i,j)$…
We introduce a large family of combinatorial objects, called standard puzzles, defined by very simple rules. We focus on the standard puzzles for which the enumeration problems can be solved by explicit formulas or by classical numbers,…
We show that the Glauber dynamics on proper 9-colourings of the triangular lattice is rapidly mixing, which allows for efficient sampling. Consequently, there is a fully polynomial randomised approximation scheme (FPRAS) for counting proper…
We introduce Quintessence: a family of burr puzzles based on the geometry and combinatorics of the 120-cell. We discuss the regular polytopes, their symmetries, the dodecahedron as an important special case, the three-sphere, and the…
Consider a bin containing $n$ balls colored with two colors. In a $k$-query, $k$ balls are selected by a questioner and the oracle's reply is related (depending on the computation model being considered) to the distribution of colors of the…
In responding to a question on Math Stackexchange, the author formulated the problem of determining the number of strings of balls colored in most $n$ colors with a number $k$ of repeated colors. In this paper, we formulate the problem more…
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…
Solving Sudoku puzzles is one of the most popular pastimes in the world. Puzzles range in difficulty from easy to very challenging; the hardest puzzles tend to have the most empty cells. The current paper explains and compares three…
The Petersen colouring conjecture states that every bridgeless cubic graph admits an edge-colouring with $5$ colours such that for every edge $e$, the set of colours assigned to the edges adjacent to $e$ has cardinality either $2$ or $4$,…
Consider the following puzzle: a farmland consists of several fields, each occupied by either a farmer, a fox, a chicken, or a caterpillar. Creatures in neighboring fields can swap positions as long as the fox avoids the farmer, the chicken…
We consider the tiling of an $n$-board (a $1\times n$ array of square cells of unit width) with half-squares ($\frac12\times1$ tiles) and $(\frac12,\frac12)$-fence tiles. A $(\frac12,\frac12)$-fence tile is composed of two half-squares…
A c-coloring of G(n,m)=n x m is a mapping of G(n,m) into {1,...,c} such that no four corners forming a rectangle have the same color. In 2009 a challenge was proposed via the internet to find a 4-coloring of G(17,17). This attracted…
A quasiperiodic 7-fold rhombic tiling is constructed with an iterative substitution scheme. The inflation factor is 5.04892..., the square of the longer diagonal of a regular heptagon. There are many substitutions possible that fill larger…
The class of passable games was recently introduced by Selinger as a class of combinatorial games that are suitable for modelling monotone set coloring games such as Hex. In a monotone set coloring game, the players alternately color the…
The incidence coloring conjecture, proposed by Brualdi and Massey in 1993, states that the incidence coloring number of every graph is at most ${\it \Delta}+2$, where ${\it \Delta}$ is the maximum degree of a graph. The conjecture was shown…