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The Rubix Cube is a 3-dimensional single-player combination puzzle attracting attention in the reinforcement learning community. A Rubix Cube has six faces and twelve possible actions, leading to a small and unconstrained action space and a…
Colored triangulations offer a generalization of combinatorial maps to higher dimensions. Just like maps are gluings of polygons, colored triangulations are built as gluings of special, higher-dimensional building blocks, such as octahedra,…
Existing combinatorial search methods are often complex and require some level of expertise. This work introduces a simple and efficient deep learning method for solving combinatorial problems with a predefined goal, represented by Rubik's…
We study the problem of folding a polyomino $P$ into a polycube $Q$, allowing faces of $Q$ to be covered multiple times. First, we define a variety of folding models according to whether the folds (a) must be along grid lines of $P$ or can…
Rubik's Cube is one of the most famous combinatorial puzzles involving nearly $4.3 \times 10^{19}$ possible configurations. Its mathematical description is expressed by the Rubik's group, whose elements define how its layers rotate. We…
We consider the Hadwiger-Nelson problem on the chromatic number of the plane under conditions of coloring a map containing a finite number of vertices in any bounded region. Woodall (1973) and Townsend (1981) showed that at least 6 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…
We show how to construct a cubic partial cube from any simplicial arrangement of lines or pseudolines in the projective plane. As a consequence, we find nine new infinite families of cubic partial cubes as well as many sporadic examples.
Which polyominoes can be folded into a cube, using only creases along edges of the square lattice underlying the polyomino, with fold angles of $\pm 90^\circ$ and $\pm 180^\circ$, and allowing faces of the cube to be covered multiple times?…
A cube is an 8-rep-tile: it is the union of eight smaller copies of itself. Is there a set with a hole which has this property? The computer found an interesting and complicated solution, which then could be simplified. We discuss some…
A facial unique-maximum coloring of a plane graph is a vertex coloring where on each face $\alpha$ the maximal color appears exactly once on the vertices of $\alpha$. If the coloring is required to be proper, then the upper bound for the…
We construct perfect $2$-colorings of the $12$-hypercube that attain our recent bound on the dimension of arbitrary correlation immune functions. We prove that such colorings with parameters $(x,12-x,4+x,8-x$) exist if $x=0$, $2$, $3$ and…
The figure eight is a remarkable solution to the Newtonian three-body problem in which the three equal masses chase each around a planar curve having the qualitative shape and symmetries of a figure eight. Here we prove that each lobe of…
We propose an open question that seeks to generalise the Four Colour Theorem from two to three dimensions. As an appetiser, we show that 12 instead of four colours are both sufficient and necessary to colour every 2-complex that embeds in a…
In this paper, we study the following two hypercube coloring problems: Given $n$ and $d$, find the minimum number of colors, denoted as ${\chi}'_{d}(n)$ (resp. ${\chi}_{d}(n)$), needed to color the vertices of the $n$-cube such that any two…
Barnette conjectured that all cubic $3$-connected plane graphs with maximum face size at most $6$ are hamiltonian. We provide a method of construction of a hamiltonian cycle (in dual terms) in an arbitrary cubic, $3$-connected plane graph…
A normal edge-coloring of a cubic graph is a proper edge-coloring, in which every edge is adjacent to edges colored with four distinct colors or to edges colored with two distinct colors. It is conjectured that $5$ colors suffice for a…
We study the generalized Ramsey numbers $f(Q_n, C_{k}, q)$, that is, the minimum number of colors needed to edge-color the hypercube $Q_n$ so that every copy of the cycle $C_{k}$ has at least $q$ colors. Our main result is that for any…
Edge-matching problems, also called edge matching puzzles, are abstractions of placement problems with neighborhood conditions. Pieces with colored edges have to be placed on a board such that adjacent edges have the same color. The problem…
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…