Related papers: Tetris is NP-hard even with $O(1)$ rows or columns
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and…
A famous result of D. Walkup is that an $m\times n$ rectangle may be tiled by T-tetrominos if and only if both $m$ and $n$ are multiples of 4. The "if" portion may be proved by tiling a $4\times 4$ block, and then copying that block to fill…
We show that reconstructing a tree from order information on triples is NP-hard. This is in contrast to the case for ultra-metrics and for subtree information on quadruples which are both known to allow polynomial time reconstruction.
In this paper, we give a very simple proof that Treewidth is NP-complete; this proof also shows NP-completeness on the class of co-bipartite graphs. We then improve the result by Bodlaender and Thilikos from 1997 that Treewidth is…
Interpreting three-leaf binary trees or {\em rooted triples} as constraints yields an entailment relation, whereby binary trees satisfying some rooted triples must also thus satisfy others, and thence a closure operator, which is known to…
Optimization over $l\times m\times n$ integer $3$-way tables with given line-sums is NP-hard already for fixed $l=3$, but is polynomial time solvable with both $l,m$ fixed. In the {\em huge} version of the problem, the variable dimension…
We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n by n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles…
We strengthen a result by Laskar and Lyle (Discrete Appl. Math. (2009), 330-338) by proving that it is NP-complete to decide whether a bipartite planar graph can be partitioned into three independent dominating sets. In contrast, we show…
A graph class is hereditary if it is closed under vertex deletion. We give examples of NP-hard, PSPACE-complete and NEXPTIME-complete problems that become constant-time solvable for every hereditary graph class that is not equal to the…
Tiling planar regions with dominoes is a classical problem in which the decision and counting problems are polynomial. We prove a variety of hardness results (both NP- and #P-completeness) for different generalizations of dominoes in three…
We prove that two pushing-blocks puzzles are intractable in 2D. One of our constructions improves an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99] for a puzzle inspired by the game PushPush. The second construction answers a…
In the field of algorithmic self-assembly, a long-standing unproven conjecture has been that of the NP-hardness of binary pattern tile set synthesis (2-PATS). The $k$-PATS problem is that of designing a tile assembly system with the…
For a graph property $\Pi$, Subgraph Complementation to $\Pi$ is the problem to find whether there is a subset $S$ of vertices of the input graph $G$ such that modifying $G$ by complementing the subgraph induced by $S$ results in a graph…
We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 3D. The puzzle, inspired by the game PushPush, consists of unit square blocks on an integer lattice. An agent may push blocks (but never pull them) in attempting to move…
Several computational problems in phylogenetic reconstruction can be formulated as restrictions of the following general problem: given a formula in conjunctive normal form where the literals are rooted triples, is there a rooted binary…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
Despite its long history, the classical game of peg solitaire continues to attract the attention of the scientific community. In this paper, we consider two problems with an algorithmic flavour which are related with this game, namely…
Given a set of colored points in the plane, we ask if there exists a crossing-free straight-line drawing of a spanning forest, such that every tree in the forest contains exactly the points of one color class. We show that the problem is…
We study tilings of regions in the square lattice with L-shaped trominoes. Deciding the existence of a tiling with L-trominoes for an arbitrary region in general is NP-complete, nonetheless, we identify restrictions to the problem where it…
A natural way of increasing our understanding of NP-complete graph problems is to restrict the input to a special graph class. Classes of $H$-free graphs, that is, graphs that do not contain some graph $H$ as an induced subgraph, have…