Related papers: Billiards, Checkers, and Quadratic Reciprocity

We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…

Quantum billiards have been simulated so far in many ways, but in this work a new aproximation is considerated. This study is based on the quantum billiard already obtained by others authors via a tensor product of two 1-D quantum walks .…

We consider the free motion of a point particle inside a circular billiard with periodically moving boundary, with the assumption that the collisions of the particle with the boundary are elastic so that the energy of the particle is not…

We study polygonal billiards with reflection laws contracting the reflected angle towards the normal. It is shown that if a polygon does not have parallel sides facing each other, then the corresponding billiard map has finitely many…

The goal of this paper is an analysis of the geometry of billiards in ellipses, based on properties of confocal central conics. The extended sides of the billiards meet at points which are located on confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. They…

We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…

Systems of pinned billiard balls serve as simplified models of collisions, where all particles remain fixed in their positions while their (pseudo-)velocities evolve in accordance with the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. For…

We study chaotic properties of eigenstates depending on the degree of complexity in boundaries of a 2D periodic billiard. Main attention is paid to the situation when the motion of a classical particle is strongly chaotic. Our approach…

We prove some recent experimental observations of D. Reznik concerning periodic billiard orbits in ellipses. For example, the sum of cosines of the angles of a periodic billiard polygon remains constant in the one-parameter family of such…

In this paper outer, or dual, billiards outside regular polygons are studied; in particular, periodic points for cases of strictly convex "tables" and for regular n-gons with n = 3,4,6,8,12 are discussed. The main results of the paper are:…

Pebble games were extensively studied in the 1970s and 1980s in a number of different contexts. The last decade has seen a revival of interest in pebble games coming from the field of proof complexity. Pebbling has proven to be a useful…

Let $m_G$ denote the number of perfect matchings of the graph $G$. We introduce a number of combinatorial tools for determining the parity of $m_G$ and giving a lower bound on the power of 2 dividing $m_G$. In particular, we introduce…

Rational polygonal billiards are one of the key models among the larger class of pseudo-integrable billiards. Their billiard flow may be lifted to the geodesic flow on a translation surface. Whereas such classical billiards have been much…

We study the classical and quantum mechanics of a three-dimensional stadium billiard. It consists of two quarter cylinders that are rotated with respect to each other by 90 degrees, and it is classically chaotic. The billiard exhibits only…

The coherent tunneling phenomenon is investigated in rectangular billiards divided into two domains by a classically unclimbable potential barrier. We show that by placing a pointlike scatterer inside the billiard, we can control the…

The famous conjecture of V.Ya.Ivrii (1978) says that {\it in every billiard with infinitely-smooth boundary in a Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero}. In the present paper we study the complex algebraic version of…

A billiard is a dynamical system in which a particle alternates between motion in a straight line and specular reflection from a boundary. For billiards in non-convex areas bounded by segments of confocal quadrics are studied. The topology…

Given a domain or, more generally, a Riemannian manifold with boundary, a billiard is the motion of a particle when the field of force is absent. Trajectories of such a motion are geodesics inside the domain; and the particle reflects from…

Regularized learning is a fundamental technique in online optimization, machine learning and many other fields of computer science. A natural question that arises in these settings is how regularized learning algorithms behave when faced…

We consider a billiard in the plane with periodic configuration of convex scatterers. This system is recurrent, in the sense that almost every orbit comes back arbitrarily close to the initial point. In this paper we study the time needed…