Related papers: Gourds: a sliding-block puzzle with turning
An inglenook puzzle is a classic shunting (switching) puzzle often found on model railway layouts. A collection of wagons sits in a fan of sidings with a limited length headshunt (lead track). The aim of the puzzle is to rearrange the…
We consider the problem of determining the minimum number of moves needed to solve a certain one-dimensional peg puzzle. Let N be a positive integer. The puzzle apparatus consists of a block with a single row of 2N+1 equally spaced holes…
We consider the complexity of problems related to the combinatorial game Free-Flood-It, in which players aim to make a coloured graph monochromatic with the minimum possible number of flooding operations. Our main result is that computing…
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…
Nonograms are logic puzzles in which cells in a grid must be colored or left blank according to the numbers that are located in its headers. In this study, we analyze different techniques to solve this type of logical problem using an…
Sumplete is a logic puzzle famous for being developed by ChatGPT. The puzzle consists of a rectangular grid, with each cell containing a number. The player has to cross out some numbers such that the sum of uncrossed numbers in each row and…
Jigsaw puzzle solving is an intriguing problem which has been explored in computer vision for decades. This paper focuses on a specific variant of the problem - solving puzzles with eroded boundaries. Such erosion makes the problem…
Jigsaw puzzle solving, the problem of constructing a coherent whole from a set of non-overlapping unordered visual fragments, is fundamental to numerous applications, and yet most of the literature of the last two decades has focused thus…
In the Nikoli pencil-and-paper game Double Choco, a puzzle consists of an m $\times$ n grid of cells of white or gray color, separated by dotted lines where each cell possibly contains an integer. The goal is to partition the grid into…
How can a stack of identical blocks be arranged to extend beyond the edge of a table as far as possible? We consider a generalization of this classic puzzle to blocks that differ in width and mass. Despite the seemingly simple premise, we…
Consider a $2\times n$ rectangular grid composed of $1\times 1$ squares. Cutting only along the edges between squares, how many ways are there to divide the board into $k$ pieces? Building off the work of Durham and Richmond, who found the…
A c-coloring of G(n,m)=n x m is a mapping of G(n,m) into {1,...,c} such that no four corners forming a rectangle have the same color. In 2009 a challenge was proposed via the internet to find a 4-coloring of G(17,17). This attracted…
Given a tiling of a 2D grid with several types of tiles, we can count for every row and column how many tiles of each type it intersects. These numbers are called the_projections_. We are interested in the problem of reconstructing a tiling…
In the $15$-puzzle game, $15$ labeled square tiles are reconfigured on a $4\times 4$ board through an escort, wherein each (time) step, a single tile neighboring it may slide into it, leaving the space previously occupied by the tile as the…
We consider a puzzle such that a set of colored cubes is given as an instance. Each cube has unit length on each edge and its surface is colored so that what we call the Surface Color Condition is satisfied. Given a palette of six colors,…
In this paper, we show that the solution to a large class of "tiling" problems is given by a polynomial sequence of binomial type. More specifically, we show that the number of ways to place a fixed set of polyominos on an $n\times n$…
Motivated by a new way of visualizing hypergraphs, we study the following problem. Consider a rectangular grid and a set of colors $\chi$. Each cell $s$ in the grid is assigned a subset of colors $\chi_s \subseteq \chi$ and should be…
A survey of enumeration problems arising from the study of graphs formed when the edges of a polygon are marked with evenly spaced points and every pair of points is joined by a line. A few of these problems have been solved, a classical…
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…
All roads lead to Rome is the core idea of the puzzle game Roma. It is played on an $n \times n$ grid consisting of quadratic cells. Those cells are grouped into boxes of at most four neighboring cells and are either filled, or to be…