Related papers: The Legend of Zelda: The Complexity of Mechanics

We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…

We study the parameterized complexity of several positional games. Our main result is that Short Generalized Hex is W[1]-complete parameterized by the number of moves. This solves an open problem from Downey and Fellows' influential list of…

Generalized Geography is a combinatorial game played on a directed graph. Players take turns moving a token from vertex to vertex, deleting a vertex after moving the token away from it. A player unable to move loses. It is well known that…

Goedel's completeness theorem is concerned with provability, while Girard's theorem in ludics (as well as full completeness theorems in game semantics) are concerned with proofs. Our purpose is to look for a connection between these two…

In this paper, we give simple NP-hardness reductions for three popular video games. The first is Baba Is You, an award winning 2D block puzzle game with the key premise being the ability to rewrite the rules of the game. The second is Fez,…

Capacitated network bargaining games are popular combinatorial games that involve the structure of matchings in graphs. We show that it is always possible to stabilize unit-weight instances of this problem (that is, ensure that they admit a…

Consider planning a trip in a train network. In contrast to, say, a road network, the edges are temporal, i.e., they are only available at certain times. Another important difficulty is that trains, unfortunately, sometimes get delayed.…

We show that the decision problem for the basic system of interpretability logic IL is PSPACE-complete. For this purpose we present an algorithm which uses polynomial space with respect to the complexity of a given formula. The existence of…

Amazons is a board game which combines elements of Chess and Go. It has become popular in recent years, and has served as a useful platform for both game-theoretic study and AI games research. Buro showed that simple Amazons endgames are…

In this paper, we study three connection games among the most widely played: Havannah, Twixt, and Slither. We show that determining the outcome of an arbitrary input position is PSPACE-complete in all three cases. Our reductions are based…

Exactly 20 years ago at MFCS, Demaine posed the open problem whether the game of Dots & Boxes is PSPACE-complete. Dots & Boxes has been studied extensively, with for instance a chapter in Berlekamp et al. "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical…

We study the computational complexity of finding stable outcomes in hedonic games, which are a class of coalition formation games. We restrict our attention to symmetric additively-separable hedonic games, which are a nontrivial subclass of…

The Hanoi Omega-Automata (HOA) format has established itself as the definitive standard for encoding $\omega$-regular automata in modern synthesis tools. While HOA is widely adopted due to its succinct symbolic representation, using Boolean…

Courcelle's Theorem states that every problem definable in Monadic Second-Order logic can be solved in linear time on structures of bounded treewidth, for example, by constructing a tree automaton that recognizes or rejects a tree…

Parity games have been broadly studied in recent years for their applications to controller synthesis and verification. In practice, partial solvers for parity games that execute in polynomial time, while incomplete, can solve most games in…

We show that the widely used homotopy method for solving fixpoint problems, as well as the Harsanyi-Selten equilibrium selection process for games, are PSPACE-complete to implement. Extending our result for the Harsanyi-Selten process, we…

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…

We study the algorithmic complexity of Maker-Breaker games played on the edge sets of general graphs. We mainly consider the perfect matching game and the $H$-game. Maker wins if she claims the edges of a perfect matching in the first, and…

Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…

We study uncoordinated matching markets with additional local constraints that capture, e.g., restricted information, visibility, or externalities in markets. Each agent is a node in a fixed matching network and strives to be matched to…