Related papers: Complexity of Solo Chess with Unlimited Moves
This paper examines two different variants of the Ludo game, involving multiple dice and a fixed number of total turns. Within each variant, multiple game lengths (total no. of turns) are considered. To compare the two variants, a set of…
Quantum phenomena have remained largely inaccessible to the general public. This can be attributed to the fact that we do not experience quantum mechanics on a tangible level in our daily lives. Games can provide an environment in which…
To count the number of maximum independent arrangements of $n^2$ kings on a $2n\times 2n$ chessboard, we build a $2^n \times (n+1)$ matrix whose entries are independent arrangements of $n$ kings on $2\times 2n$ rectangles. Utilizing upper…
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
In this paper, we show that the solution to a large class of "tiling" problems is given by a polynomial sequence of binomial type. More specifically, we show that the number of ways to place a fixed set of polyominos on an $n\times n$…
The notions of captured/lost vertices and dead edges in the Shannon game (Shannon switching game on nodes) are examined using graph theory. Simple methods are presented for identifying some dead edges and some captured sets of vertices,…
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…
The strength of chess engines together with the availability of numerous chess games have attracted the attention of chess players, data scientists, and researchers during the last decades. State-of-the-art engines now provide an…
Partial methods play an important role in formal methods and beyond. Recently such methods were developed for parity games, where polynomial-time partial solvers decide the winners of a subset of nodes. We investigate here how effective…
Cohn and Umans proposed a framework for developing fast matrix multiplication algorithms based on the embedding computation in certain groups algebras. In subsequent work with Kleinberg and Szegedy, they connected this to the search for…
In his celebrated book "On Number and Games" (Academic Press, New-York, 1976), J.H. Conway introduced twelve versions of compound games. We analyze these twelve versions for the Node-Kayles game on paths. For usual disjunctive compound,…
The Tower of Hanoi game is a classical puzzle in recreational mathematics (Lucas 1883) which also has a strong record in pure mathematics. In a borderland between these two areas we find the characterization of the minimal number of moves,…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
We study the following variant of the 15 puzzle. Given a graph and two token placements on the vertices, we want to find a walk of the minimum length (if any exists) such that the sequence of token swappings along the walk obtains one of…
This paper deals with the complexity of the problem of computing a pure Nash equilibrium for discrete preference games and network coordination games beyond $O(\log n)$-treewidth and tree metric spaces. First, we estimate the number of…
Clique-width is one of the graph complexity measures leading to polynomial special-case algorithms for generally NP-complete problems, e.g. graph colourability. The best two currently known algorithms for verifying c-colourability of graphs…
This paper proves that arrangement of music is NP-hard when subject to various constraints: avoiding musical dissonance, limiting how many notes can be played simultaneously, and limiting transition speed between chords. These results imply…
We consider a problem introduced by Mossel and Ross [Shotgun assembly of labeled graphs, arXiv:1504.07682]. Suppose a random $n\times n$ jigsaw puzzle is constructed by independently and uniformly choosing the shape of each "jig" from $q$…
Consider the following one-player game played on an initially empty graph with $n$ vertices. At each stage a randomly selected new edge is added and the player must immediately color the edge with one of $r$ available colors. Her objective…
We establish that the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) threshold problem for mean-payoff games is NP-complete. While the SPE threshold problem was recently shown to be decidable (in doubly exponential time) and NP-hard, its exact worst…