Related papers: Faulty picture-hanging improved
A rectangle blanket is a set of non-overlapping axis-aligned rectangles, used to approximately represent the two dimensional image of a shape approximately. The use of a rectangle blanket is a widely considered strategy for speeding-up the…
This paper proposes an approach to content-preserving stitching of images with regular boundary constraints, which aims to stitch multiple images to generate a panoramic image with regular boundary. Existing methods treat image stitching…
String art is an arrangement of pegs on a board with thread strung between these pegs to form beautiful geometric patterns. In this article, we consider a simple form of string art where pegs are placed on two diverging axes, and segments…
We investigate the 'Digital Synaptic Neural Substrate' (DSNS) computational creativity approach further with respect to the size and quality of images that can be used to seed the process. In previous work we demonstrated how combining…
We explore the following problem: given a collection of creases on a piece of paper, each assigned a folding direction of mountain or valley, is there a flat folding by a sequence of simple folds? There are several models of simple folds;…
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…
Deciding whether a graph can be embedded in a grid using only unit-length edges is NP-complete, even when restricted to binary trees. However, it is not difficult to devise a number of graph classes for which the problem is polynomial, even…
Reflections are very common phenomena in our daily photography, which distract people's attention from the scene behind the glass. The problem of removing reflection artifacts is important but challenging due to its ill-posed nature. The…
Image registration is a classical problem in machine vision which seeks methods to align discrete images of the same scene to subpixel accuracy in general situations. As with all estimation problems, the underlying difficulty is the partial…
The Coupon Collector's Problem is one of the few mathematical problems that make news headlines regularly. The reasons for this are on one hand the immense popularity of soccer albums (called Paninimania) and on the other hand that no…
This paper proves a bottom-left placement theorem for the rectangle packing problem, stating that if it is possible to orthogonally place n arbitrarily given rectangles into a rectangular container without overlapping, then we can achieve a…
Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to…
Binary embedding is the problem of mapping points from a high-dimensional space to a Hamming cube in lower dimension while preserving pairwise distances. An efficient way to accomplish this is to make use of fast embedding techniques…
We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…
Untangling is a process in which some vertices of a planar graph are moved to obtain a straight-line plane drawing. The aim is to move as few vertices as possible. We present an algorithm that untangles the cycle graph C_n while keeping at…
We propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
There is an increased interest in solving complex constrained problems where part of the input is not given as facts but received as raw sensor data such as images or speech. We will use "visual sudoku" as a prototype problem, where the…
Given a subset of states $S$ of a deterministic finite automaton and a word $w$, the preimage is the subset of all states mapped to a state in $S$ by the action of $w$. We study three natural problems concerning words giving certain…
Peg solitaire is an old puzzle with a 300 year history. We consider two ways a computer can be utilized to find interesting peg solitaire puzzles. It is common for a peg solitaire puzzle to begin from a symmetric board position, we have…
Puzzle solving is a combinatorial challenge due to the difficulty of matching adjacent pieces. Instead, we infer a mental image from all pieces, which a given piece can then be matched against avoiding the combinatorial explosion.…