Related papers: PSPACE-Hard 2D Super Mario Games: Thirteen Doors
A family of codes with a natural two-dimensional structure is presented, inspired by an application of RAID type of architectures whose units are solid state drives (SSDs). Arrays of SSDs behave differently to arrays of hard disk drives…
We consider the computational complexity of winning this turn (mate-in-1 or "finding lethal") in Hearthstone as well as several other single turn puzzle types introduced in the Boomsday Lab expansion. We consider three natural…
Pebble games were originally formulated to study time-space tradeoffs in computation, modeled by games played on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Close connections between pebbling and cryptography have been known for decades. A series of…
We define a new, partizan, loopy combinatorial game, Forced-Capture Hnefatafl, similar to Hnefatafl, except that players are forced to make capturing moves when available. We show that this game is PSPACE-hard using a reduction from…
In this work we face a challenging puzzle video game: A Good Snowman is Hard to Build. The objective of the game is to build snowmen by moving and stacking snowballs on a discrete grid. For the sake of player engagement with the game, it is…
We give a direct polynomial-time reduction from parity games played over the configuration graphs of collapsible pushdown systems to safety games played over the same class of graphs. That a polynomial-time reduction would exist was known…
We study computational problems arising from the iterated removal of weakly dominated actions in anonymous games. Our main result shows that it is NP-complete to decide whether an anonymous game with three actions can be solved via iterated…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
We show that the maximum success probability of players sharing quantum entanglement in a two-player game with classical questions of logarithmic length and classical answers of constant length is NP-hard to approximate to within constant…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of several reversible, fully deterministic systems. At the core, we develop a framework for such proofs (building on a result of Tsukiji and Hagiwara and a framework for motion planning through gadgets), showing…
We prove that computing an $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium of a win-lose bimatrix game with constant sparsity is PPAD-hard for inverse-polynomial $\epsilon$. Our result holds for 3-sparse games, which is tight given that 2-sparse…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
In 2010, Bre\v{s}ar, Klav\v{z}ar and Rall introduced the optimization variant of the graph domination game and the game domination number, which was proved PSPACE-hard by Bre\v{s}ar et al. in 2016. In 2024, Leo Versteegen obtained the…
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…
Automated game design is a rapidly growing area of research, yet many aspects of game design lie largely unexamined still, as most systems focus on two-dimensional games with clear objectives and goal-oriented gameplay. This paper describes…
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…
Recursed is a 2D puzzle platform video game featuring treasure chests that, when jumped into, instantiate a room that can later be exited (similar to function calls), optionally generating a jar that returns back to that room (similar to…
We study the puzzle graphs of hexagonal sliding puzzles of various shapes and with various numbers of holes. The puzzle graph is a combinatorial model which captures the solvability and the complexity of sequential mechanical puzzles.…
Pervasive backdoors are triggered by dynamic and pervasive input perturbations. They can be intentionally injected by attackers or naturally exist in normally trained models. They have a different nature from the traditional static and…
We consider one-round games between a classical verifier and two provers who share entanglement. We show that when the constraints enforced by the verifier are `unique' constraints (i.e., permutations), the value of the game can be well…