Related papers: Higher-dimensional cubical sliding puzzles
The Rubix Cube is a 3-dimensional single-player combination puzzle attracting attention in the reinforcement learning community. A Rubix Cube has six faces and twelve possible actions, leading to a small and unconstrained action space and a…
While logic puzzles have engaged individuals through problem-solving and critical thinking, the creation of new puzzle rules has largely relied on ad-hoc processes. Pencil puzzles, such as Slitherlink and Sudoku, represent a prominent…
In this piece, we examine one variant of the infamous 15 Tile Puzzle and develop a mathematical backing behind why it is unsolvable. Using concepts of permutations, bijectivity, and cycle transpositions, we not only prove how to model this…
We present a nondeterministic model of computation based on reversing edge directions in weighted directed graphs with minimum in-flow constraints on vertices. Deciding whether this simple graph model can be manipulated in order to reverse…
The mathematical structure of the widely popular Sudoku puzzles is akin to typical hard constraint satisfaction problems that lie at the heart of many applications, including protein folding and the general problem of finding the ground…
We develop infinitary analogues of the $N\times N\times N$ Rubik's cube. We'll be pushed to consider the possibility of transfinitely many twists and the foremost question we shall study is whether or not all infinite scrambles are…
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…
The Generalized Sliding-Tile Puzzle (GSTP), allowing many square tiles on a board to move in parallel while enforcing natural geometric collision constraints on the movement of neighboring tiles, provide a high-fidelity mathematical model…
We study the classic sliding cube model for programmable matter under parallel reconfiguration in three dimensions, providing novel algorithmic and surprising complexity results in addition to generalizing the best known bounds from two to…
We consider a set of challenging sequential manipulation puzzles, where an agent has to interact with multiple movable objects and navigate narrow passages. Such settings are notoriously difficult for Task-and-Motion Planners, as they…
An $n\times n\times\dots\times n$ hypercube is made from $n^d$ unit hypercubes. Two unit hypercubes are neighbours if they share a $(d-1)$-dimensional face. In each step of a dismantling process, we remove a unit hypercube that has…
The new concept of a system of hex equations is introduced as an overdetermined system of six five-point face-centered quad equations defined on six vertices of a hexagon. For a consistent system of hex equations, two variables on…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
Twisted hypercubes are generalizations of the Boolean hypercube, obtained by iteratively connecting two instances of a graph by a uniformly random perfect matching. Dudek et al. showed that when the two instances are independent, these…
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…
Sliced Sudoku-based space-filling designs and, more generally, quasi-sliced orthogonal array-based space-filling designs are useful experimental designs in several contexts, including computer experiments with categorical in addition to…
In the Token Jumping problem we are given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and two independent sets $S$ and $T$ of $G$, each of size $k \geq 1$. The goal is to determine whether there exists a sequence of $k$-sized independent sets in $G$, $\langle S_0,…
Puzzles based on coloured cubes and other coloured geometrical figures have a long history in the recreational mathematical literature. One of the most commercially famous of these puzzles is the Instant Insanity that consists of four…
How can we predict the difficulty of a Sudoku puzzle? We give an overview of difficulty rating metrics and evaluate them on extensive dataset on human problem solving (more then 1700 Sudoku puzzles, hundreds of solvers). The best results…
A wide variety of methods have been used to compute percolation thresholds. In lattice percolation, the most powerful of these methods consists of microcanonical simulations using the union-find algorithm to efficiently determine the…