Related papers: Inglenook Shunting Puzzles
It has been suggested recently that knots might exist as stable soliton solutions in a simple three-dimensional classical field theory, opening up a wide range of possible applications in physics and beyond. We have re-examined and extended…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
As neural language models approach human performance on NLP benchmark tasks, their advances are widely seen as evidence of an increasingly complex understanding of syntax. This view rests upon a hypothesis that has not yet been empirically…
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
Mastermind is in essence a search problem in which a string of symbols that is kept secret must be found by sequentially playing strings that use the same alphabet, and using the responses that indicate how close are those other strings to…
Icosoku is a challenging and interesting puzzle that exhibits highly symmetrical and combinatorial nature. In this paper, we pose the questions derived from the puzzle, but with more difficulty and generality. In addition, we also present a…
When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…
A deadlock occurs in a network when two or more items prevent each other from moving and are stalled. In a general model, items are stored at vertices and each vertex $v$ has a buffer with $b(v)$ slots. Given a route for each item toward…
We study the parameterized complexity of a variant of the classic video game Snake that models real-world problems of motion planning. Given a snake-like robot with an initial position and a final position in an environment (modeled by a…
We study a family of maps from $S_n \to S_n$ we call fixed point homing shuffles. These maps generalize a few known problems such as Conway's Topswops, and a card shuffling process studied by Gweneth McKinley. We show that the iterates of…
Peg solitaire is an old puzzle with a 300 year history. We consider two ways a computer can be utilized to find interesting peg solitaire puzzles. It is common for a peg solitaire puzzle to begin from a symmetric board position, we have…
In train routing, the headway is the minimum distance that must be maintained between successive trains for safety and robustness. We introduce a model for train routing that requires a fixed headway to be maintained between trains, and…
Suppose that a train is running along a railway network, starting from a designated origin, with the goal of reaching a designated destination. The network, however, is of a special nature: every time the train traverses a switch, the…
Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this…
Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…
Many problems in machine learning involve calculating correspondences between sets of objects, such as point clouds or images. Discrete optimal transport provides a natural and successful approach to such tasks whenever the two sets of…
Given a graph $G$ and two independent sets $I_s$ and $I_t$ of size $k$, the independent set reconfiguration problem asks whether there exists a sequence of $k$-sized independent sets $I_s = I_0, I_1, I_2, \ldots, I_\ell = I_t$ such that…
We introduce and investigate the computational complexity of a novel physical problem known as the Pinball Wizard problem. It involves an idealized pinball moving through a maze composed of one-way gates (outswing doors), plane walls,…
In 1985 Hopcroft, Joseph and Whitesides showed it is NP-complete to decide whether a carpenter's ruler with segments of given positive lengths can be folded into a line of at most a given length, such that the folded hinges alternate…
The Sequential Multiple Knapsack Problem is a special case of Multiple knapsack problem in which the items sizes are divisible. A characterization of the optimal solutions of the problem and a description of the convex hull of all the…