Related papers: Pach's animal problem within the bounding box
The "interior goat problem" is a numerical puzzle which has haunted mathematicians for nearly three centuries. Closed-form solutions have only been found for the two-dimensional case, and although approximations have been established for…
An animal is a planar shape formed by attaching congruent regular polygons, known as tiles, along their edges. In this paper, we study extremal animals defined on regular tessellations of the plane. In 1976, Harary and Harborth studied…
Current integer programming solvers fail to decide whether 12 unit cubes can be packed into a 1x1x11 box within an hour using the natural relaxation of Chen/Padberg. We present an alternative relaxation of the problem of packing boxes into…
The problem of bounding of the distance between the two bodies of volume $\varepsilon$ located inside the $n$-dimensional body $B$ of unit volume where $n \to \infty$ is considered. In some cases such distances are bounded by function…
The aim in packing problems is to decide if a given set of pieces can be placed inside a given container. A packing problem is defined by the types of pieces and containers to be handled, and the motions that are allowed to move the pieces.…
Some recent results concerning a particle confined in a one-dimensional box with moving walls are briefly reviewed. By exploiting the same techniques used for the 1D problem, we investigate the behavior of a quantum particle confined in a…
We consider a puzzle such that a set of colored cubes is given as an instance. Each cube has unit length on each edge and its surface is colored so that what we call the Surface Color Condition is satisfied. Given a palette of six colors,…
Given a chain of $HW$ cubes where each cube is marked "turn $90^\circ$" or "go straight", when can it fold into a $1 \times H \times W$ rectangular box? We prove several variants of this (still) open problem NP-hard: (1) allowing some cubes…
Consider the following puzzle: a farmland consists of several fields, each occupied by either a farmer, a fox, a chicken, or a caterpillar. Creatures in neighboring fields can swap positions as long as the fox avoids the farmer, the chicken…
The Rubik's cube is a famous puzzle in which faces can be moved and the corresponding movement operations define a group. We consider here a generalization to any $3$-valent map. We prove an upper bound on the size of the corresponding…
Multi-robot motion planning is a hard problem. We investigate restricted variants of the problem where square robots are allowed to slide over an arbitrary curve to a new position only a constant number of times each. We show that the…
For a given family of similar shapes, what we call a "unit shape" strongly analogizes the role of the unit circle within the family of all circles. Within many such families of similar shapes, we present what we believe is naturally and…
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…
Euler's three-body problem is the problem of solving for the motion of a particle moving in a Newtonian potential generated by two point sources fixed in space. This system is integrable in the Liouville sense. We consider the Euler problem…
We consider three-dimensional clusters of identical bubbles packed around a central bubble and calculate their energy and optimal shape. We obtain the surface area and bubble pressures to improve on existing growth laws for…
The problem of constructing a perfect cuboid is related to a certain class of univariate polynomials with three integer parameters $a$, $b$, and $u$. Their irreducibility over the ring of integers under certain restrictions for $a$, $b$,…
Realistic 3D-conformations of protein structures can be embedded in a cubic lattice using exclusively integer numbers, additions, subtractions and boolean operations.
When can a polyomino piece of paper be folded into a unit cube? Prior work studied tree-like polyominoes, but polyominoes with holes remain an intriguing open problem. We present sufficient conditions for a polyomino with one or several…
A \emph{subcube partition} is a partition of the Boolean cube $\{0,1\}^n$ into subcubes. A subcube partition is irreducible if the only sub-partitions whose union is a subcube are singletons and the entire partition. A subcube partition is…
Packing is a classical problem where one is given a set of subsets of Euclidean space called objects, and the goal is to find a maximum size subset of objects that are pairwise non-intersecting. The problem is also known as the Independent…