Related papers: Push-Pull Block Puzzles are Hard
We introduce a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework that performs top-down recursive planning via learned subgoals, successfully applied to the complex combinatorial puzzle game Sokoban. Our approach constructs a…
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…
In the popular computer game of Tetris, the player is given a sequence of tetromino pieces and must pack them into a rectangular gameboard initially occupied by a given configuration of filled squares; any completely filled row of the…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
We study a higher-dimensional 'balls-into-bins' problem. An infinite sequence of i.i.d. random vectors is revealed to us one vector at a time, and we are required to partition these vectors into a fixed number of bins in such a way as to…
Solving a Radon-Kaczmarz puzzle involves filling a square grid with positive integers, each between one and nine, satisfying certain clues coming from the sum of entries that lie on the same line in the square grid. Given a set of slopes…
Rigidity Percolation is a crucial framework for describing rigidity transitions in amorphous systems. We present a new, efficient algorithm to study central-force Rigidity Percolation in two dimensions. This algorithm combines the Pebble…
The move-minimizing puzzles presented here are certain types of one-player combinatorial games that are shown to have explicit solutions whenever they can be encoded in a certain way as diamond-colored modular or distributive lattices. Our…
In this paper, we present a curious experiment with the hot list strategy in solving sliding block puzzles by paramodulation. The hot list strategy is one of the look-ahead strategies using paramodulation in automated reasoning. We define…
We study here the semi-supervised $k$-clustering problem where information is available on whether pairs of objects are in the same or in different clusters. This information is either available with certainty or with a limited level of…
As mobile robots become useful performing everyday tasks in complex real-world environments, they must be able to traverse a range of difficult terrain types such as stairs, stepping stones, gaps, jumps and narrow passages. This work…
Let $S$ be an independent set of a simple undirected graph $G$. Suppose that each vertex of $S$ has a token placed on it. The tokens are allowed to be moved, one at a time, by sliding along the edges of $G$, so that after each move, the…
In areas as diverse as contemporary art, play structures, climbing equipment, and modular construction toys, we see the presence of building block-like polyhedral complexes, which are generalizations of the pieces in the game Tetris. We…
We revisit the minimum-link path problem: Given a polyhedral domain and two points in it, connect the points by a polygonal path with minimum number of edges. We consider settings where the vertices and/or the edges of the path are…
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…
The ball-constrained weighted maximin dispersion problem $(\rm P_{ball})$ is to find a point in an $n$-dimensional Euclidean ball such that the minimum of the weighted Euclidean distance from given $m$ points is maximized. We propose a new…
In this paper we are going to solve an open problem about the game tetris. We are going to give the first results in the complexity of a variant of offline tetris introduced by Erik Demaine, Susan Hohenberger and David Liben Nowell in their…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
Wooden blocks are a common toy for infants, allowing them to develop motor skills and gain intuition about the physical behavior of the world. In this paper, we explore the ability of deep feed-forward models to learn such intuitive…
We study the Torus Puzzle, a solitaire game in which the elements of an input $m \times n$ matrix need to be rearranged into a target configuration via a sequence of unit rotations (i.e., circular shifts) of rows and/or columns. Amano et…