Related papers: Complexity of Solo Chess with Unlimited Moves

We consider Chess played on an $m \times n$ board (with $m$ and $n$ arbitrary positive integers), with only the two kings and the white rook remaining, but placed at arbitrary positions. Using the symbolic finite state method, developed by…

In 1979, David Fabian found a complete game of two-person Chinese Checkers in 30 moves (15 by each player) [Martin Gardner, Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers, MAA, 1997]. This solution requires that the two players cooperate to generate a…

We study the computational complexity of an important property of simple, regular and weighted games, which is decisiveness. We show that this concept can naturally be represented in the context of hypergraph theory, and that decisiveness…

We show that, in John Conway's board game Phutball (or Philosopher's Football), it is NP-complete to determine whether the current player has a move that immediately wins the game. In contrast, the similar problems of determining whether…

A matching in a graph is uniquely restricted if no other matching covers exactly the same set of vertices. We establish tight lower bounds on the maximum size of a uniquely restricted matching in terms of order, size, and maximum degree.

Notes on the Spinpossible puzzle game. We give a mathematical description of the game, prove some elementary bounds on the length of optimal solutions, and consider variations of the game which place restrictions on the set of permitted…

This paper deals with a generalized Sudoku problem and investigates the unicity of a given solution. We introduce constraint sets, which is a generalization of the rows, columns and blocks of a classical Sudoku puzzle. The unicity property…

Many puzzle video games, like Sokoban, involve moving some agent in a maze. The reachable locations are usually apparent for a human player, and the difficulty of the game is mainly related to performing actions on objects, such as pushing…

We consider the complexity of problems related to the combinatorial game Free-Flood-It, in which players aim to make a coloured graph monochromatic with the minimum possible number of flooding operations. Our main result is that computing…

We study the Torus Puzzle, a solitaire game in which the elements of an input $m \times n$ matrix need to be rearranged into a target configuration via a sequence of unit rotations (i.e., circular shifts) of rows and/or columns. Amano et…

We consider apictorial edge-matching puzzles, in which the goal is to arrange a collection of puzzle pieces with colored edges so that the colors match along the edges of adjacent pieces. We devise an algebraic representation for this…

It is odd that chess grandmasters often disagree in their analysis of positions, sometimes even of simple ones, and that a grandmaster can hold his own against an powerful analytic machine such as Deep Blue. The fact that there must exist…

This paper proves that push-pull block puzzles in 3D are PSPACE-complete to solve, and push-pull block puzzles in 2D with thin walls are NP-hard to solve, settling an open question by Zubaran and Ritt. Push-pull block puzzles are a type of…

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…

We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n by n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles…

We derive recurrences and closed-form expressions for counting nonattacking placements of two types of chess pieces with unbounded straight-line moves, namely the bishop (two diagonal moves) and the anassa (one horizontal or vertical move…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…

Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…

A selfmate is a Chess problem in which White, moving first, needs to force Black to checkmate within a specified number of moves. The reflexmate is a derivative of the selfmate in which White compels Black to checkmate with the added…

We introduce a new type of card shuffle called one-sided transpositions. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric…