Related papers: Move-minimizing puzzles and diamond-colored modula…
We study compositions whose parts are colored by subsequences of the Fibonacci numbers. We give explicit bijections between Fibonacci colored compositions and several combinatorial objects, including certain restricted ternary and…
Ball sort puzzle is a popular logic puzzle consisting of several bins containing balls of multiple colors. Each bin works like a stack; a ball has to follow the last-in first-out order. The player has to sort the balls by color such that…
We provide a characterization of upper locally distributive lattices (ULD-lattices) in terms of edge colorings of their cover graphs. In many instances where a set of combinatorial objects carries the order structure of a lattice this…
We encode arbitrary finite impartial combinatorial games in terms of lattice points in rational convex polyhedra. Encodings provided by these \emph{lattice games} can be made particularly efficient for octal games, which we generalize to…
Cooperative games are an important class of problems in game theory, where the goal is to distribute a value among a set of players who are allowed to cooperate by forming coalitions. An outcome of the game is given by an allocation vector…
Motivated by recent work of Hanser and Mayers, we study two combinatorial puzzles arising from the theory of Kohnert polynomials. Such polynomials are defined as generating polynomials for certain collections of diagrams consisting of unit…
We consider apictorial edge-matching puzzles, in which the goal is to arrange a collection of puzzle pieces with colored edges so that the colors match along the edges of adjacent pieces. We devise an algebraic representation for this…
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…
A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…
We give the distribution functions, the expected values, and the moments of linear combinations of lattice polynomials from the uniform distribution. Linear combinations of lattice polynomials, which include weighted sums, linear…
We consider colored compositions where only some parts are allowed different colors, depending on their locations in the composition. The counting sequences are obtained through generating functions. Connections to many other combinatorial…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
In this paper we study a single player game consisting of $n$ black checkers and $m$ white checkers, called shifting the checkers. We have proved that the minimum number of steps needed to play the game for general $n$ and $m$ is $nm + n +…
Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) such that a game instance admits a winning…
Several articles deal with tilings with various shapes, and also a very frequent type of combinatorics is to examine the walks on graphs or on grids. We combine these two things and give the numbers of the shortest walks crossing the tiled…
A special sorting operation called Context Directed Swap, and denoted \textbf{cds}, performs certain types of block interchanges on permutations. When a permutation is sortable by \textbf{cds}, then \textbf{cds} sorts it using the fewest…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
In this article, we study the combinatorics of congruence subgroups of the modular group. More precisely, we consider the notion of minimal monomial solutions. These are the solutions of a matrix equation (also appearing in the study of…
Combinatorial Game Theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that studies sequential 2-player games with perfect information. Normal play is the convention where a player who cannot move loses. Here, we generalize…
Subtraction games is a class of combinatorial games. It was solved since the Sprague-Grundy Theory was put forward. This paper described a new algorithm for subtraction games. The new algorithm can find win or lost positions in subtraction…