Related papers: How do you fix an Oval Track Puzzle?
It is known that a graph isomorphism testing algorithm is polynomially equivalent to a detecting of a graph non-trivial automorphism algorithm. The polynomiality of the latter algorithm, is obtained by consideration of symmetry properties…
Let ${\cal T}_n$ be the full symmetric semigroup on $X_n = \{1, 2,..., n\}$ and let ${\cal OCT}_n$ and ${\cal ORCT}_n$ be its subsemigroups of order-preserving and order-preserving or order-reversing full contraction mappings of $X_n$,…
People have been studying the following problem: Given a finite set S with a hidden (black box) binary operation * on S which might come from a group law, and suppose you have access to an oracle that you can ask for the operation x*y of…
We prove that complete Boolean algebras can be reconstructed from any locally moving subgroup of their full automorphism group. We use this theorem in order to prove that linear orders and circles can be reconstructed from small subgroups…
We consider the ideal orientation problem in planar graphs. In this problem, we are given an undirected graph $G$ with positive edge lengths and $k$ pairs of distinct vertices $(s_1, t_1), \dots, (s_k, t_k)$ called terminals, and we want to…
Edge-matching problems, also called edge matching puzzles, are abstractions of placement problems with neighborhood conditions. Pieces with colored edges have to be placed on a board such that adjacent edges have the same color. The problem…
A Cayley-sudoku table of a finite group G is a Cayley table for G, the body of which is partitioned into uniformly sized rectangular blocks in such a way that each group element appears exactly once in each block. A Cayley-sudoku table is…
The directed graph reachability problem takes as input an $n$-vertex directed graph $G=(V,E)$, and two distinguished vertices $s$ and $t$. The problem is to determine whether there exists a path from $s$ to $t$ in $G$. This is a canonical…
In this paper, we show that the solution to a large class of "tiling" problems is given by a polynomial sequence of binomial type. More specifically, we show that the number of ways to place a fixed set of polyominos on an $n\times n$…
The structure of the coincidence symmetry group of an arbitrary $n$-dimensional lattice in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space is considered by describing a set of generators. Particular attention is given to the coincidence isometry…
In this paper, we study a reversible process (more precisely, a groupoid/group action) resembling the classical 15-puzzle, where the legal moves are to ``move the unique hole inside a translate of a shape $S$''. Such a process can be…
The Kneser Graph $K(n,k)$ has as vertices all $k$-subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ and edges connecting two vertices if they are disjoint. The $s$-stable Kneser Graph $K_{s-stab}(n, k)$ is obtained from the Kneser graph by deleting vertices with…
An N-tiling of triangle ABC by triangle T is a way of writing ABC as a union of N triangles congruent to T, overlapping only at their boundaries. The triangle T is the "tile". The tile may or may not be similar to ABC. In this paper we…
This paper will analyze several quadratic-time solvable problems, and will classify them into two classes: problems that are solvable in truly subquadratic time (that is, in time $O(n^{2-\epsilon})$ for some $\epsilon>0$) and problems that…
A tiling of the unit square is an MTP tiling if the smallest tile can tile all the other tiles. We look at the function $f(n)=\max \sum s_i$, where $s_i$ is the side length of the $i$th tile and the sum is taken over all MTP tilings with…
In real Hilbert spaces, this paper generalizes the orthogonal groups $\mathrm{O}(n)$ in two ways. One way is by finite multiplications of a family of operators from reflections which results in a group denoted as $\Theta(\kappa)$, the other…
Given a directed graph $D$ on $n$ vertices and a positive integer $k$, the Arc-Disjoint Cycle Packing problem is to determine whether $D$ has $k$ arc-disjoint cycles. This problem is known to be W[1]-hard in general directed graphs. In this…
Tile the unit square with $n$ small squares. We determine the minimum of the sum of the side lengths of the $n$ small squares, where the minimum is taken over all tilings of the unit square with $n$ squares.
Determining if an input undirected graph is Hamiltonian, i.e., if it has a cycle that visits every vertex exactly once, is one of the most famous NP-complete problems. We consider the following generalization of Hamiltonian cycles: for a…
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…