Related papers: A simple proof that the $(n^2-1)$-puzzle is hard
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…
Scheduling problems are fundamental in combinatorial optimization. Much work has been done on approximation algorithms for NP-hard cases, but relatively little is known about exact solutions when some part of the input is a fixed parameter.…
We consider the $n\times n$ game of Phutball. It is shown that, given an arbitrary position of stones on the board, it is a PSPACE-hard problem to determine whether the specified player can win the game, regardless of the opponent's choices…
We study the classic sliding cube model for programmable matter under parallel reconfiguration in three dimensions, providing novel algorithmic and surprising complexity results in addition to generalizing the best known bounds from two to…
An inglenook puzzle is a classic shunting (switching) puzzle often found on model railway layouts. A collection of wagons sits in a fan of sidings with a limited length headshunt (lead track). The aim of the puzzle is to rearrange the…
In the field of algorithmic self-assembly, a long-standing unproven conjecture has been that of the NP-hardness of binary pattern tile set synthesis (2-PATS). The $k$-PATS problem is that of designing a tile assembly system with the…
Pattern-Based Constraint Satisfaction and Logic Puzzles develops a pure logic, pattern-based perspective of solving the finite Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), with emphasis on finding the "simplest" solution. Different ways of…
The crossing number of a graph is the minimum number of edge crossings that a graph can have when drawn in the plane. Determining this number, known as the Crossing Number problem, is a celebrated problem in combinatorial optimization. It…
A shuffle of two strings is formed by interleaving the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. A string is a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings. There is a known polynomial time dynamic…
Rubik's Cube is one of the most famous combinatorial puzzles involving nearly $4.3 \times 10^{19}$ possible configurations. Its mathematical description is expressed by the Rubik's group, whose elements define how its layers rotate. We…
Decision-theoretic troubleshooting is one of the areas to which Bayesian networks can be applied. Given a probabilistic model of a malfunctioning man-made device, the task is to construct a repair strategy with minimal expected cost. The…
We show that packing axis-aligned unit squares into a simple polygon $P$ is NP-hard, even when $P$ is an orthogonal and orthogonally convex polygon with half-integer coordinates. It has been known since the early 80s that packing unit…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…
In the packing-constrained point covering problem, PC^2, one seeks configurations of points in the plane that cannot all be covered by a packing arrangement of unit disks. We consider in particular the problem of finding the minimum number…
We investigate active learning by pairwise similarity over the leaves of trees originating from hierarchical clustering procedures. In the realizable setting, we provide a full characterization of the number of queries needed to achieve…
The Orbit Problem consists of determining, given a matrix $A\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times d}$ and vectors $x,y\in \mathbb{R}^d$, whether there exists $n\in \mathbb{N}$ such that $A^n=y$. This problem was shown to be decidable in a seminal work of…
We study Snipperclips, a computer puzzle game whose objective is to create a target shape with two tools. The tools start as constant-complexity shapes, and each tool can snip (i.e., subtract its current shape from) the other tool. We study…
The prize-collecting Steiner tree problem PCSTP is a well-known generalization of the classical Steiner tree problem in graphs, with a large number of practical applications. It attracted particular interest during the latest (11th) DIMACS…
The mathematical structure of the widely popular Sudoku puzzles is akin to typical hard constraint satisfaction problems that lie at the heart of many applications, including protein folding and the general problem of finding the ground…
We consider a new kind of straight and shifted plane partitions/Young tableaux --- ones whose diagrams are no longer of partition shape, but rather Young diagrams with boxes erased from their upper right ends. We find formulas for the…