Related papers: Tetris with Few Piece Types
This paper presents the following results on sets that are complete for NP. 1. If there is a problem in NP that requires exponential time at almost all lengths, then every many-one NP-complete set is complete under length-increasing…
A forcing set $S$ in a combinatorial problem is a set of elements such that there is a unique solution that contains all the elements in $S$. An anti-forcing set is the symmetric concept: a set $S$ of elements is called an anti-forcing set…
We study the computational complexity of the Buttons \& Scissors game and obtain sharp thresholds with respect to several parameters. Specifically we show that the game is NP-complete for $C = 2$ colors but polytime solvable for $C = 1$.…
For an NP intersect coNP function g of the Nisan-Wigderson type and a string b outside its range we consider a two player game on a common input a to the function. One player, a computationally limited Student, tries to find a bit of g(a)…
Given a tree $T$ on $n$ vertices, and $k, b, s_1, \ldots, s_b \in N$, the Tree Partitioning problem asks if at most $k$ edges can be removed from $T$ so that the resulting components can be grouped into $b$ groups such that the number of…
This paper resolves a long-standing open question in bicriteria scheduling regarding the complexity of a single machine scheduling problem which combines the number of tardy jobs and the maximal tardiness criteria. We use the lexicographic…
In this note we prove NP-hardness of the following problem: Given a set of matrices, is there a convex combination of those that is a nonsingular M-matrix? Via known characterizations of M-matrices, our result establishes NP-hardness of…
It is well-known that the question of whether a given finite region can be tiled with a given set of tiles is NP-complete. We show that the same is true for the right tromino and square tetromino on the square lattice, or for the right…
In this paper, we give simple NP-hardness reductions for three popular video games. The first is Baba Is You, an award winning 2D block puzzle game with the key premise being the ability to rewrite the rules of the game. The second is Fez,…
In areas as diverse as contemporary art, play structures, climbing equipment, and modular construction toys, we see the presence of building block-like polyhedral complexes, which are generalizations of the pieces in the game Tetris. We…
We study three problems related to the computational complexity of the popular game Minesweeper. The first is consistency: given a set of clues, is there any arrangement of mines that satisfies it? This problem has been known to be…
This work explores the relationship between solution space and time complexity in the context of the $\textbf{P}$ vs. $\textbf{NP}$ problem, particularly through the lens of the sliding tile puzzle and root finding algorithms. We focus on…
Can easy sets only have easy certificate schemes? In this paper, we study the class of sets that, for all NP certificate schemes (i.e., NP machines), always have easy acceptance certificates (i.e., accepting paths) that can be computed in…
We prove that path puzzles with complete row and column information--or equivalently, 2D orthogonal discrete tomography with Hamiltonicity constraint--are strongly NP-complete, ASP-complete, and #P-complete. Along the way, we newly…
This paper proves that arrangement of music is NP-hard when subject to various constraints: avoiding musical dissonance, limiting how many notes can be played simultaneously, and limiting transition speed between chords. These results imply…
We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…
We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…
Do complexity classes have many-one complete sets if and only if they have Turing-complete sets? We prove that there is a relativized world in which a relatively natural complexity class-namely a downward closure of NP, \rsnnp - has…
We consider the robustness of computational hardness of problems whose input is obtained by applying independent random deletions to worst-case instances. For some classical $NP$-hard problems on graphs, such as Coloring, Vertex-Cover, and…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…