Related papers: Parity Property of Hexagonal Sliding Puzzles
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…
We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…
The 15-Puzzle is a well studied permutation puzzle. This paper explores the group structure of a three-dimensional variant of the 15-Puzzle known as the Varikon Box, with the goal of providing a heuristic that would help a human solve it…
Higher-dimensional orthogonal packing problems have a wide range of practical applications, including packing, cutting, and scheduling. Previous efforts for exact algorithms have been unable to avoid structural problems that appear for…
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…
We investigate the problem of determining if a given graph corresponds to the dual of a triangulation of a simple polygon. This is a graph recognition problem, where in our particular case we wish to recognize a graph which corresponds to…
We consider arrangements of axis-aligned rectangles in the plane. A geometric arrangement specifies the coordinates of all rectangles, while a combinatorial arrangement specifies only the respective intersection type in which each pair of…
A quasiperiodic 7-fold rhombic tiling is constructed with an iterative substitution scheme. The inflation factor is 5.04892..., the square of the longer diagonal of a regular heptagon. There are many substitutions possible that fill larger…
The Sudoku puzzle has achieved worldwide popularity recently, and attracted great attention of the computational intelligence community. Sudoku is always considered as Satisfiability Problem or Constraint Satisfaction Problem. In this…
Squaregraphs were originally defined as finite plane graphs in which all inner faces are quadrilaterals (i.e., 4-cycles) and all inner vertices (i.e., the vertices not incident with the outer face) have degrees larger than three. The planar…
Finding Hamitonian Cycles in square grid graphs is a well studied and important questions. More recent work has extended these results to triangular and hexagonal grids, as well as further restricted versions. In this paper, we examine a…
Given a graph G, we investigate the question of determining the parity of the number of homomorphisms from G to some other fixed graph H. We conjecture that this problem exhibits a complexity dichotomy, such that all parity graph…
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…
Su-Doku, a popular combinatorial puzzle, provides an excellent testbench for heuristic explorations. Several interesting questions arise from its deceptively simple set of rules. How many distinct Su-Doku grids are there? How to find a…
A generalized `$15$ puzzle' consists of an $n \times n$ numbered grid, with one missing number. A move in the game switches the position of the empty square with the position of one of its neighbors. We solve Diaconis' `15 puzzle problem'…
This work explores the relationship between solution space and time complexity in the context of the $\textbf{P}$ vs. $\textbf{NP}$ problem, particularly through the lens of the sliding tile puzzle and root finding algorithms. We focus on…
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
Every body knows that identical regular triangles or squares can tile the whole plane. Many people know that identical regular hexagons can tile the plane properly as well. In fact, even the bees know and use this fact! Is there any other…
Simplicial arrangements are classical objects in discrete geometry. Their classification remains an open problem but there is a list conjectured to be complete at least for rank three. A further important class in the theory of hyperplane…
A platypus graph is a non-hamiltonian graph for which every vertex-deleted subgraph is traceable. They are closely related to families of graphs satisfying interesting conditions regarding longest paths and longest cycles, for instance…