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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…
Learning to program has become common in schools, higher education and individual learning. Although testing is an important aspect of programming, it is often neglected in education due to a perceived lack of time and knowledge, or simply…
The author has long enjoyed using the CSP refinement checker FDR to solve puzzles, as witnessed by examples in \cite{tpc,ucs}. Recent experiments have shown that a number of games of patience (card games for one) are now well within bounds.…
The Nakamura number is an appropriate invariant of a simple game to study the existence of social equilibria and the possibility of cycles. For symmetric quota games its number can be obtained by an easy formula. For some subclasses of…
This paper is about computing constrained approximate Nash equilibria in polymatrix games, which are succinctly represented many-player games defined by an interaction graph between the players. In a recent breakthrough, Rubinstein showed…
A new approach for the study of social games and communications is proposed. Games are simulated between cognitive players who build the opponent's internal model and decide their next strategy from predictions based on the model. In this…
Nonogram is a popular combinatorial puzzle (similar in nature to Sudoku or Minesweeper) in which a puzzle solver must determine if there exists a setting of the puzzle parameters that satisfy a given set of constraints. It has long been…
People can evaluate features of problems and their potential solutions well before we can effectively solve them. When considering a game we have never played, for instance, we might infer whether it is likely to be challenging, fair, or…
Modern board games are a rich source of entertainment for many people, but also contain interesting and challenging structures for game playing research and implementing game playing agents. This paper studies the game Patchwork, a two…
This paper introduces a collection of board games specifically chosen to serve as a basis for programming exercises. We examine the attractiveness of board games in this context as well as features that make a particular game a good…
Consider QBF, the Quantified Boolean Formula problem, as a combinatorial game ruleset. The problem is rephrased as determining the winner of the game where two opposing players take turns assigning values to boolean variables. In this…
Applying neural network (NN) methods in games can lead to various new and exciting game dynamics not previously possible. However, they also lead to new challenges such as the lack of large, clean datasets, varying player skill levels, and…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
AlphaZero-style reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved superhuman performance in many complex board games such as Chess, Shogi, and Go. However, we showcase that these algorithms encounter significant and fundamental…
Negotiations, a model of concurrency with multi party negotiation as primitive, have been recently introduced in arXiv:1307.2145, arXiv:1403.4958. We initiate the study of games for this model. We study coalition problems: can a given…
In this paper we experiment with a 2-player strategy board game where playing models are evolved using reinforcement learning and neural networks. The models are evolved to speed up automatic game development based on human involvement at…
We announce misere-play solutions to several previously-unsolved combinatorial games. The solutions are described in terms of misere quotients--commutative monoids that encode the additive structure of specific misere-play games. We also…
The game of bridge consists of two stages: bidding and playing. While playing is proved to be relatively easy for computer programs, bidding is very challenging. During the bidding stage, each player knowing only his/her own cards needs to…
This paper presents iNNK, a multiplayer drawing game where human players team up against an NN. The players need to successfully communicate a secret code word to each other through drawings, without being deciphered by the NN. With this…
Deep Neural Networks have achieved great success in some of the complex tasks that humans can do with ease. These include image recognition/classification, natural language processing, game playing etc. However, modern Neural Networks fail…