Related papers: Parity Property of Hexagonal Sliding Puzzles
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…
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…
Jigsaw puzzle solving requires the rearrangement of unordered pieces into their original pose in order to reconstruct a coherent whole, often an image, and is known to be an intractable problem. While the possible impact of automatic puzzle…
We consider the tiling of an $n$-board (a $1\times n$ array of square cells of unit width) with half-squares ($\frac12\times1$ tiles) and $(\frac12,\frac12)$-fence tiles. A $(\frac12,\frac12)$-fence tile is composed of two half-squares…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
The puzzle method was introduced by Choi and Park as an effective method for finding non-singular characteristic maps over wedged simplicial complexes $K(J)$ obtained from a given simplicial complex $K$. We study further the mod 2 case of…
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…
The study of tilings is a major problem in many mathematical instances, which is studied in two main different approaches: when considering the existence (or obstructions to the existence) of a tiling with a given tile and the other…
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…
Hexagonal circle patterns are introduced, and a subclass thereof is studied in detail. It is characterized by the following property: For every circle the multi-ratio of its six intersection points with neighboring circles is equal to -1.…
Motivated by a relaxed notion of the celebrated Hamiltonian cycle, this paper investigates its variant, parity Hamiltonian cycle (PHC): A PHC of a graph is a closed walk which visits every vertex an odd number of times, where we remark that…
The $\mathscr{P}$-position sets of some combinatorial games have special combinatorial structures. For example, the $\mathscr{P}$-position set of the hexad game, first investigated by Conway and Ryba, is the block set of the Steiner system…
We consider the number of domino tilings of an odd-by-odd rectangle that leave one hole. This problem is equivalent to the number of near-perfect matchings of the odd-by-odd rectangular grid. For any particular position of the vacancy on…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…
Exactly solvable models are essential in physics. For many-body spin-1/2 systems, an important class of such models consists of those that can be mapped to free fermions hopping on a graph. We provide a complete characterization of models…
The clustered planarity problem (c-planarity) asks whether a hierarchically clustered graph admits a planar drawing such that the clusters can be nicely represented by regions. We introduce the cd-tree data structure and give a new…
As a continuation to our previous work [9, 10], we consider the domino tiling problem with impurities. (1) if we have more than two impurities on the boundary, we can compute the number of corresponding perfect matchings by using the…
Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with…
Graph products are characterized by the existence of non-trivial equivalence relations on the edge set of a graph that satisfy a so-called square property. We investigate here a generalization, termed RSP-relations. The class of graphs with…
Fifteen Puzzle problem is one of the most classical problems that have captivated mathematical enthusiasts for centuries. This is mainly because of the huge size of the state space with approximately 1013 states that have to be explored and…