Related papers: Longest winning paths in Hex

At some places (see the references) Martin Erickson describes a certain game: "Two players alternately write O's (first player) and X's (second player) in the unoccupied cells of an n x n grid. The first player (if any) to occupy four cells…

The Tur\'an number of a graph H, ex(n;H), is the maximum number of edges in any graph on n vertices which does not contain H as a subgraph. Let P_l denote a path on l vertices, and kP_l denote k vertex-disjoint copies of P_l. We determine…

Using a bijective proof, we show the number of ways to arrange a maximum number of nonattacking pawns on a $2m\times 2m$ chessboard is ${2m\choose m}^2$, and more generally, the number of ways to arrange a maximum number of nonattacking…

(I) We prove that the (maximum) number of monotone paths in a geometric triangulation of $n$ points in the plane is $O(1.7864^n)$. This improves an earlier upper bound of $O(1.8393^n)$; the current best lower bound is $\Omega(1.7003^n)$.…

Suppose that $\xi^{(n)}_1,\xi^{(n)}_2,...,\xi^{(n)}_n$ are i.i.d with $P(\xi^{(n)}_i=1)=p_n=1-P(\xi^{(n)}_i=0)$. Let $U^{(n)}$ and $W^{(n)}$ be the longest length of arithmetic progressions and of arithmetic progressions mod $n$ relative to…

Let $N_{\mathcal{P}}(n,H)$ denote the maximum number of copies of $H$ in an $n$ vertex planar graph. The problem of bounding this function for various graphs $H$ has been extensively studied since the 70's. A special case that received a…

We consider the minimum-weight path between any pair of nodes of the n-vertex complete graph in which the weights of the edges are i.i.d. exponentially distributed random variables. We show that the longest of these minimum-weight paths has…

Using mostly elementary considerations, we find out who wins the game of Domineering on all rectangular boards of width 2, 3, 5, and 7. We obtain bounds on other boards as well, and prove the existence of polynomial-time strategies for…

Let $P$ be a set of $2n$ points in convex position, such that $n$ points are colored red and $n$ points are colored blue. A non-crossing alternating path on $P$ of length $\ell$ is a sequence $p_1, \dots, p_\ell$ of $\ell$ points from $P$…

For a fixed graph $F$, we would like to determine the maximum number of edges in a properly edge-colored graph on $n$ vertices which does not contain a rainbow copy of $F$, that is, a copy of $F$ all of whose edges receive a different…

We study the design of fixed-parameter algorithms for problems already known to be solvable in polynomial time. The main motivation is to get more efficient algorithms for problems with unattractive polynomial running times. Here, we focus…

We devise a method to exactly compute the length of the longest simple path in factored state spaces, like state spaces encountered in classical planning. Although the complexity of this problem is NEXP-Hard, we show that our method can be…

In this paper, we study long paths and Hamiltonian paths in inhomogenous random graphs. In the first part of the paper, we consider an inhomogenous Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graph $G_E$ with average edge density $p_n.$ We prove that if…

The aim of the paper is to enumerate all closed knight paths of length n over a square board of size n+1. The closed knight paths of length 4, 6 and 8 are classified up to equivalence. We determine that there are exactly 3 equivalence…

We prove two dichotomy results for detecting long paths as patterns in a given graph. The NP-hard problem Longest Induced Path is to determine the longest induced path in a graph. The NP-hard problem Longest Path Contractibility is to…

For any two squares A and B of an m x n checkerboard, we determine whether it is possible to move a checker through a route that starts at A, ends at B, and visits each square of the board exactly once. Each step of the route moves to an…

In this note we show that every tournament on $n$ vertices contains the $k$-th power of a directed path of length $n/2^{6k+7}$, which improves upon the recent bound of Scott and Kor\'{a}ndi of $n/2^{2^{3k}}$. By doing so, we get an inverse…

Let $\mathcal{P}$ be the surface of a convex polyhedron with $n$ vertices. We consider the two-point shortest path query problem for $\mathcal{P}$: Constructing a data structure so that given any two query points $s$ and $t$ on…

The Tur\'an number of a graph H, ex(n,H), is the maximum number of edges in a graph on n vertices which does not have H as a subgraph. Let P_k be the path with k vertices, the square P^2_k of P_k is obtained by joining the pairs of vertices…

We study the number $N\_n$ of open paths of length $n$ in supercritical oriented percolation on $\Zd \times \N$, with $d \ge 1$. We prove that on the percolation event $\{\inf N\_n\textgreater{}0\}$, $N\_n^{1/n}$ almost surely converges to…