Related papers: Tetris is NP-hard even with $O(1)$ rows or columns
We study different domination problems of attacking and non-attacking rooks and queens on polyominoes and polycubes of all dimensions. Our main result proves that maximum independent domination is NP-complete for non-attacking queens and…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire played on a computer. Two popular board shapes are the 33-hole cross-shaped board, and the 15-hole triangle board---we use them as examples throughout. The basic game begins from a full board…
We prove several hardness results on folding origami crease patterns. Flat-folding finite crease patterns is fixed-parameter tractable in the ply of the folded pattern (how many layers overlap at any point) and the treewidth of an…
A binary matrix satisfies the consecutive ones property (COP) if its columns can be permuted such that the ones in each row of the resulting matrix are consecutive. Equivalently, a family of sets F = {Q_1,..,Q_m}, where Q_i is subset of R…
A covering with dominoes of a rectilinear region is called \emph{tatami} if no four dominoes meet at any point. We describe a reduction from planar 3SAT to Domino Tatami Covering. As a consequence it is NP-complete to decide whether there…
This paper presents the following results on sets that are complete for NP. 1. If there is a problem in NP that requires exponential time at almost all lengths, then every many-one NP-complete set is complete under length-increasing…
In most of today's exactly solved classes of polyominoes, either all members are convex (in some way), or all members are directed, or both. If the class is neither convex nor directed, the exact solution uses to be elusive. This paper is…
Following a recently considered generalization of linear equations to unordered data vectors, we perform a further generalization to ordered data vectors. These generalized equations naturally appear in the analysis of vector addition…
We introduce a generalization of "Solo Chess", a single-player variant of the game that can be played on chess.com. The standard version of the game is played on a regular 8 x 8 chessboard by a single player, with only white pieces, using…
We characterize the existence of a polynomial (rational) matrix when its eigenstructure (complete structural data) and some of its rows are prescribed. For polynomial matrices, this problem was solved in a previous work when the polynomial…
We show that two-dimensional billiard systems are Turing complete, in the sense that the halting of any Turing machine with a given input is equivalent to a certain bounded trajectory in this system entering a specified open set. Billiards…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
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…
We prove that a sufficiently strong parallel repetition theorem for a special case of multiplayer (multiprover) games implies super-linear lower bounds for multi-tape Turing machines with advice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the…
Clique-width is a well-studied graph parameter. For graphs of bounded clique-width, many problems that are NP-hard in general can be polynomial-time solvable. The fact motivates several studies to investigate whether the clique-width of…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
Motivated by Chudnovsky's structure theorem of bull-free graphs, Abu-Khzam, Feghali, and M\"uller have recently proved that deciding if a graph has a vertex partition into disjoint cliques and a triangle-free graph is NP-complete for five…
Octilinear graph drawings are a standard paradigm extending the orthogonal graph drawing style by two additional slopes (+1 and -1). We are interested in two constrained drawing problems where the input specifies a so-called representation,…
The game of Othello is one of the world's most complex and popular games that has yet to be computationally solved. Othello has roughly ten octodecillion (10 to the 58th power) possible game records and ten octillion (10 to the 28th power)…
Several articles deal with tilings with squares and dominoes on 2-dimensional boards, but only a few on boards in 3-dimensional space. We examine a tiling problem with colored cubes and bricks of $(2\times2\times n)$-board in three…