Related papers: Double Choco is NP-complete
In south India, there are traditional patterns of line-drawings encircling dots, called ``Kolam'', among which one-line drawings or the ``infinite Kolam'' provide very interesting questions in mathematics. For example, we address the…
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…
Connect Four is a two-player game where each player attempts to be the first to create a sequence of four of their pieces, arranged horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, by dropping pieces into the columns of a grid of width seven and…
A connected component of a vertex-coloured graph is said to be colourful if all its vertices have different colours. By extension, a graph is colourful if all its connected components are colourful. Given a vertex-coloured graph $G$ and an…
We prove that the problem of reconstructing a permutation $\pi_1,\dotsc,\pi_n$ of the integers $[1\dotso n]$ given the absolute differences $|\pi_{i+1}-\pi_i|$, $i = 1,\dotsc,n-1$ is NP-complete. As an intermediate step we first prove the…
We provide a simple linear time transformation from a directed or undirected graph with labeled edges to an unlabeled digraph, such that paths in the input graph in which no two consecutive edges have the same label correspond to paths in…
Given a graph $G$ and $k \in \mathbb{N}$, we introduce the following game played in $G$. Each round, Alice colours an uncoloured vertex of $G$ red, and then Bob colours one blue (if any remain). Once every vertex is coloured, Alice wins if…
We show that clustered planarity with overlapping clusters as introduced by Didimo et al. can be solved in polynomial time if each cluster induces a connected subgraph. It can be solved in linear time if the set of clusters is the union of…
This paper investigates the popular card game UNO from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. We define simple and concise mathematical models for the game, including both cooperative and uncooperative versions, and analyze…
Circular nim $CN(m, k)$ is a variant of nim, in which there are $m$ piles of tokens arranged in a circle and each player, in their turn, chooses at most $k$ consecutive piles in the circle and removes an arbitrary number of tokens from each…
Nonograms are a popular type of puzzle, where an arrangement of curves in the plane (in the classic version, a rectangular grid) is given together with a series of hints, indicating which cells of the subdivision are to be colored. The…
When my brilliant student Thotsaporn "Aek" Thanatipanonda asked me about how many ways can one cover n identical twins, it rang a Bell back to 1981 (see the article). As usual, the method of teaching the computer how to do its own…
Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a secret word $w$ that has been chosen from a dictionary $D$. In order to discover $w$, the player can make at most $\ell$ guesses, which must also be words from…
In this paper, a proof of the cycle double cover conjecture is presented. The cycle double cover conjecture purports that if a graph is bridgeless, then there exists a list of cycles in the graph such that every edge in the graph appears in…
A hole is an induced cycle of length at least 4, and an odd hole is a hole of odd length. It is NP-hard to color the vertices of an odd hole-free graph. A graph $G$ is perfectly divisible if every induced subgraph $H$ of $G$ with at least…
A circle graph is a graph in which the adjacency of vertices can be represented as the intersection of chords of a circle. The problem of calculating the chromatic number is known to be NP-complete, even on circle graphs. In this paper, we…
We prove that the difference between the paint number and the choice number of a complete bipartite graph $K_{N,N}$ is $\Theta(\log \log N )$. That answers the question of Zhu (2009) whether this difference, for all graphs, can be bounded…
We prove that Hamiltonicity in maximum-degree-3 grid graphs (directed or undirected) is ASP-complete, i.e., it has a parsimonious reduction from every NP search problem (including a polynomial-time bijection between solutions). As a…
This paper studies two-player zero-sum games played on graphs and makes contributions toward the following question: given an objective, how much memory is required to play optimally for that objective? We study regular objectives, where…
A $k$-coloring of a graph is an assignment of integers between $1$ and $k$ to vertices in the graph such that the endpoints of each edge receive different numbers. We study a local variation of the coloring problem, which imposes further…