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Given a palette of six colors, a colored cube is a cube where each face is colored with exactly one color and each color appears on some face. Starting with an arbitrary collection of unit length colored cubes, one can try to arrange a…
Problem solving is a composite cognitive process, invoking a number of cognitive mechanisms, such as perception and memory. Individuals may form collectives to solve a given problem together in collaboration, especially when complexity is…
Graph pebbling is a game played on a connected graph G. A player purchases pebbles at a dollar a piece, and hands them to an adversary who distributes them among the vertices of G (called a configuration) and chooses a target vertex r. The…
Writing high performance solvers for engineering applications is a delicate task. These codes are often developed on an application to application basis, highly optimized to solve a certain problem. Here, we present our work on developing a…
Su-Doku, a popular combinatorial puzzle, provides an excellent testbench for heuristic explorations. Several interesting questions arise from its deceptively simple set of rules. How many distinct Su-Doku grids are there? How to find a…
We present an effective heuristic for the Steiner Problem in Graphs. Its main elements are a multistart algorithm coupled with aggressive combination of elite solutions, both leveraging recently-proposed fast local searches. We also propose…
This paper aims to maximize algebraic connectivity of networks via topology design under the presence of constraints and an adversary. We are concerned with three problems. First, we formulate the concave maximization topology design…
Inspired by the classical fractional cascading technique, we introduce new techniques to speed up the following type of iterated search in 3D: The input is a graph $\mathbf{G}$ with bounded degree together with a set $H_v$ of 3D hyperplanes…
The localization game is a two player combinatorial game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The cops choose a set of vertices $S_1 \subseteq V$ with $|S_1|=k$. The robber then chooses a vertex $v \in V$ whose location is hidden from the cops, but…
Graph states, and the entanglement they posses, are central to modern quantum computing and communications architectures. Local complementation---the graph operation that links all local-Clifford equivalent graph states---allows us to…
We explore quantum search from the geometric viewpoint of a complex projective space $CP$, a space of rays. First, we show that the optimal quantum search can be geometrically identified with the shortest path along the geodesic joining a…
Humans excel in solving complex reasoning tasks through a mental process of moving from one idea to a related one. Inspired by this, we propose Subgoal Search (kSubS) method. Its key component is a learned subgoal generator that produces a…
Given a graph, the shortest-path problem requires finding a sequence of edges with minimum cumulative length that connects a source vertex to a target vertex. We consider a variant of this classical problem in which the position of each…
Heuristic functions are central to the performance of search algorithms such as A-star, where admissibility - the property of never overestimating the true shortest-path cost - guarantees solution optimality. Recent deep learning approaches…
Convex clustering is a recent stable alternative to hierarchical clustering. It formulates the recovery of progressively coalescing clusters as a regularized convex problem. While convex clustering was originally designed for handling…
Given a graph $G$ and a positive integer $R$ we address the following combinatorial search theoretic problem: What is the minimum number of queries of the form "does an unknown vertex $v \in V(G)$ belong to the ball of radius $r$ around…
The Clique Interdiction Problem (CIP) aims to minimize the size of the largest clique in a given graph by removing a given number of vertices. The CIP models a special Stackelberg game and has important applications in fields such as…
This paper investigates the problem of computing the shortest path between two states under resource constraints in environments with resource-replenishment regions. Namely, the length of the path is limited by a budget that can be restored…
Consider a configuration of pebbles distributed on the vertices of a connected graph of order $n$. A pebbling step consists of removing two pebbles from a given vertex and placing one pebble on an adjacent vertex. A distribution of pebbles…
Sudoku is a puzzle well-known to the scientific community with simple rules of completion, which may require a com-plex line of reasoning. This paper addresses the problem of partitioning the Sudoku image into a 1-D array, recognizing…