Related papers: A Good Snowman is Hard to Plan
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…
There is a broad consensus that the inability to form long-term plans is one of the key limitations of current foundational models and agents. However, the existing planning benchmarks remain woefully inadequate to truly measure their…
We report on progress in modelling and solving Puzznic, a video game requiring the player to plan sequences of moves to clear a grid by matching blocks. We focus here on levels with no moving blocks. We compare a planning approach and three…
Plotting is a tile-matching puzzle video game published by Taito in 1989. Its objective is to reduce a given grid of coloured blocks down to a goal number or fewer. This is achieved by the avatar character repeatedly shooting the block it…
We study a planning problem based on Plotting, a tile-matching puzzle video game published by Taito in 1989. The objective of this game is to remove a target number of coloured blocks from a grid by sequentially shooting blocks into the…
Many games feature a progression of levels that doesn't adapt to the player. This can be problematic because some players may get stuck if the progression is too difficult, while others may find it boring if the progression is too slow to…
The game of Hangman is a classical asymmetric two player game in which one player, the setter, chooses a secret word from a language, that the other player, the guesser, tries to discover through single letter matching queries, answered by…
A sliding puzzle is a combination puzzle where a player slide pieces along certain routes on a board to reach a certain end-configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel measurement of complexity of massive sliding puzzles with…
World-building, the process of developing both the narrative and physical world of a game, plays a vital role in the game's experience. Critically-acclaimed independent and AAA video games are praised for strong world-building, with game…
Boolean satisfiability (SAT) is a fundamental NP-complete problem with many applications, including automated planning and scheduling. To solve large instances, SAT solvers have to rely on heuristics, e.g., choosing a branching variable in…
The Taxman game has proven to be hard to solve optimally, so efforts have been made to find heuristic strategies that do well in practice. We present results on the NP-hardness of a variant of the game via an equivalence to a particular…
We introduce the snowblower problem (SBP), a new optimization problem that is closely related to milling problems and to some material-handling problems. The objective in the SBP is to compute a short tour for the snowblower to follow to…
Game-based learning (GBL) is widely adopted in mathematics education. It enhances learners' engagement and critical thinking throughout the mathematics learning process. However, enabling players to learn intrinsically through mathematical…
While recent advances in artificial intelligence have achieved human-level performance in environments like Starcraft and Go, many physical reasoning tasks remain challenging for modern algorithms. To date, few algorithms have been…
Although the capabilities of large language models have been increasingly tested on complex reasoning tasks, their long-horizon planning abilities have not yet been extensively investigated. In this work, we provide a systematic assessment…
This paper explores adaptive problem solving with a game designed to support the development of problem-solving skills. Using an adaptive, AI-powered puzzle game, our adaptive problem-solving system dynamically generates pathfinding-based…
This paper focuses on procedurally generating rules and communicating them to players to adjust the difficulty. This is part of a larger project to collect and adapt games in educational games for young children using a digital puzzle game…
This work investigates the reasoning and planning capabilities of foundation models and their scalability in complex, dynamic environments. We introduce PuzzlePlex, a benchmark designed to assess these capabilities through a diverse set of…
As a contribution to the challenge of building game-playing AI systems, we develop and analyse a formal language for representing and reasoning about strategies. Our logical language builds on the existing general Game Description Language…
Challenges for physical solitaire puzzle games are typically designed in advance by humans and limited in number. Alternatively, some games incorporate rules for stochastic setup, where the human solver randomly sets up the game board…