Related papers: Inglenook Shunting Puzzles
The Knight's Tour problem consists of finding a Hamiltonian path for the knight on a given set of points so that the knight can visit exactly once every vertex of the mentioned set. In the present paper, we provide a $5$-dimensional…
Edge casing is a well-known method to improve the readability of drawings of non-planar graphs. A cased drawing orders the edges of each edge crossing and interrupts the lower edge in an appropriate neighborhood of the crossing. Certain…
Rush Hour Logic was introduced in [Flake&Baum99] as a model of computation inspired by the ``Rush Hour'' toy puzzle, in which cars can move horizontally or vertically within a parking lot. The authors show how the model supports polynomial…
Higher-dimensional sliding puzzles are constructed on the vertices of a $d$-dimensional hypercube, where $2^d-l$ vertices are distinctly coloured. Rings with the same colours are initially set randomly on the vertices of the hypercube. The…
At CCCG '21 O'Rourke proposed a variant of Hopcroft, Josephs and Whitesides' (1985) NP-complete problem {\sc Ruler Folding}, which he called {\sc Ruler Wrapping} and for which all folds must be 180 degrees in the same direction. Gagie,…
The tacnode process is a universal behavior arising in nonintersecting particle systems and tiling problems. For Dyson Brownian bridges, the tacnode process describes the grazing collision of two packets of walkers. We consider such a Dyson…
We revisit a classical crossword filling puzzle which already appeared in Garey\&Jonhson's book. We are given a grid with $n$ vertical and horizontal slots and a dictionary with $m$ words and are asked to place words from the dictionary in…
The n-queens puzzle is a well-known combinatorial problem that requires to place n queens on an n x n chessboard so that no two queens can attack each other. Since the 19th century, this problem was studied by many mathematicians and…
We develop infinitary analogues of the $N\times N\times N$ Rubik's cube. We'll be pushed to consider the possibility of transfinitely many twists and the foremost question we shall study is whether or not all infinite scrambles are…
This paper describes a predictive control method to search for unstable periodic orbits of the generalized tent map. The invariant set containing periodic orbits is a repelling set with a complicated Cantor-like structure. Therefore, a…
We explore the application of automated reasoning techniques to unknot detection, a classical problem of computational topology. We adopt a two-pronged experimental approach, using a theorem prover to try to establish a positive result…
An unconstrained crossword puzzle is a generalization of the constrained crossword problem. In this problem, only the word vocabulary, and optionally the grid dimensions are known. Hence, it not only requires the algorithm to determine the…
Machine learning-based methods have achieved successful applications in machinery fault diagnosis. However, the main limitation that exists for these methods is that they operate as a black box and are generally not interpretable. This…
We consider the problem of deciding whether a polygonal knot in 3-dimensional Euclidean space is unknotted, capable of being continuously deformed without self-intersection so that it lies in a plane. We show that this problem, {\sc…
We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and…
Rikudo is a number-placement puzzle, where the player is asked to complete a Hamiltonian path on a hexagonal grid, given some clues (numbers already placed and edges of the path). We prove that the game is complete for NP, even if the…
Let I be an independent set of a graph G. Imagine that a token is located on any vertex of I. We can now move the tokens of I along the edges of the graph as long as the set of tokens still defines an independent set of G. Given two…
Cuckoo hashing [4] is a multiple choice hashing scheme in which each item can be placed in multiple locations, and collisions are resolved by moving items to their alternative locations. In the classical implementation of two-way cuckoo…
We take a close look at a classical magic trick performed with a string, where a trivial knot is seemingly isotoped into a trefoil, and generalize it to a family of magic tricks for transforming the unknot into other knots. We encode such a…
In this paper we are concerned with knight's tours on high-dimensional boards. Our main aim is to show that on the $d$-dimensional board $[n]^d$, with $n$ even, there is always a knight's tour provided that $n$ is sufficiently large. In…