Related papers: Nondango is NP-Complete
Tiling planar regions with dominoes is a classical problem in which the decision and counting problems are polynomial. We prove a variety of hardness results (both NP- and #P-completeness) for different generalizations of dominoes in three…
An edge-coloured cycle is $rainbow$ if all edges of the cycle have distinct colours. For $k\geq 1$, let $\mathcal{F}_{k}$ denote the family of all graphs with the property that any $k$ vertices lie on a cycle. For $G\in \mathcal{F}_{k}$, a…
A perfect coloring (equivalent concepts are equitable partition and partition design) of a graph $G$ is a function $f$ from the set of vertices onto some finite set (of colors) such that every node of color $i$ has exactly $S(i,j)$…
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…
We show that deciding whether a given set of circles can be packed into a rectangle, an equilateral triangle, or a unit square are NP-hard problems, settling the complexity of these natural packing problems. On the positive side, we show…
The game of Paintbucket was recently introduced by Amundsen and Erickson. It is played on a rectangular grid of black and white pixels. The players alternately fill in one of their opponent's connected components with their own color, until…
Septoku is a Sudoku variant invented by Bruce Oberg, played on a hexagonal grid of 37 cells. We show that up to rotations, reflections, and symbol permutations, there are only six valid Septoku boards. In order to have a unique solution, we…
The generalised Sudoku problem with $N$ symbols is known to be NP-complete, and hence is equivalent to any other NP-complete problem, even for the standard restricted version where $N$ is a perfect square. In particular, generalised Sudoku…
We study tilings of regions in the square lattice with L-shaped trominoes. Deciding the existence of a tiling with L-trominoes for an arbitrary region in general is NP-complete, nonetheless, we identify restrictions to the problem where it…
Jigsaw puzzle solving is an intriguing problem which has been explored in computer vision for decades. This paper focuses on a specific variant of the problem - solving puzzles with eroded boundaries. Such erosion makes the problem…
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…
A circle graph is a graph in which the adjacency of vertices can be represented as the intersection of chords of a circle. The problem of calculating the chromatic number is known to be NP-complete, even on circle graphs. In this paper, we…
We study the problem of colouring visibility graphs of polygons. In particular, for visibility graphs of simple polygons, we provide a polynomial algorithm for 4-colouring, and prove that the 5-colourability question is already NP-complete…
Ripple Effect is a logic puzzle where the player has to fill numbers into empty cells in a rectangular grid. The grid is divided into rooms, and each room must contain consecutive integers starting from 1 to its size. Also, if two cells in…
Bingo is played on a $5\times 5$ grid. Take the 25 squares to be the ground set of a closure system in which square $s$ is dependent on a set $S$ of squares iff $s$ completes a line - a row, column, or diagonal - with squares that are…
It has been shown by Bokal et al. that deciding 2-colourability of digraphs is an NP-complete problem. This result was later on extended by Feder et al. to prove that deciding whether a digraph has a circular $p$-colouring is NP-complete…
Decomposition puzzles are pencil-and-paper logic puzzles that involve partitioning a rectangular grid into several regions to satisfy certain rules. In this paper, we construct a generic card-based protocol called printing protocol, which…
Holzer and Holzer (Discrete Applied Mathematics 144(3):345--358, 2004) proved that the Tantrix(TM) rotation puzzle problem with four colors is NP-complete, and they showed that the infinite variant of this problem is undecidable. In this…
A simply colored coalgebra is a coassociative counital coalgebra $C$ over an arbitrary ring $R$, which can be decomposed into a direct sum of two $R$-modules: one generated by set-like elements and another consisting of conilpotent…
The purpose of this note is to attach a name to a natural class of combinatorial problems and to point out that this class includes many important special cases. We also show that a simple problem of placing nonoverlapping labels on a…