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Given a function based on the computation of an NP machine, can one in general eliminate some solutions? That is, can one in general decrease the ambiguity? This simple question remains, even after extensive study by many researchers over…
Symmetries occur naturally in CSP or SAT problems and are not very difficult to discover, but using them to prune the search space tends to be very challenging. Indeed, this usually requires finding specific elements in a group of…
The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…
Verification of discrete time or continuous time dynamical systems over the reals is known to be undecidable. It is however known that undecidability does not hold for various classes of systems: if robustness is defined as the fact that…
The connection between self-assembly and computation suggests that a shape can be considered the output of a self-assembly ``program,'' a set of tiles that fit together to create a shape. It seems plausible that the size of the smallest…
Consensus problems for strings and sequences appear in numerous application contexts, ranging from bioinformatics over data mining to machine learning. Closing some gaps in the literature, we show that several fundamental problems in this…
Consider the commonly known puzzle, given $k$ glass balls, find an optimal algorithm to determine the lowest floor of a building of $n$ floors from which a thrown glass ball will break. This puzzle was originally posed in its original form…
The present article introduces ptarithmetic (short for "polynomial time arithmetic") -- a formal number theory similar to the well known Peano arithmetic, but based on the recently born computability logic (see…
Shellings of simplicial complexes have long been a useful tool in topological and algebraic combinatorics. Shellings of a complex expose a large amount of information in a helpful way, but are not easy to construct, often requiring deep…
Pebble games were extensively studied in the 1970s and 1980s in a number of different contexts. The last decade has seen a revival of interest in pebble games coming from the field of proof complexity. Pebbling has proven to be a useful…
It is common to encounter situations where one must solve a sequence of similar computational problems. Running a standard algorithm with worst-case runtime guarantees on each instance will fail to take advantage of valuable structure…
Holzer and Holzer (Discrete Applied Mathematics 144(3):345--358, 2004) proved that the Tantrix(TM) rotation puzzle problem is NP-complete. They also showed that for infinite rotation puzzles, this problem becomes undecidable. We study the…
We revisit the minimum-link path problem: Given a polyhedral domain and two points in it, connect the points by a polygonal path with minimum number of edges. We consider settings where the vertices and/or the edges of the path are…
Mining and exploring databases should provide users with knowledge and new insights. Tiles of data strive to unveil true underlying structure and distinguish valuable information from various kinds of noise. We propose a novel Boolean…
Given a hierarchical plan (or schedule) with uncertain task times, we propose a deterministic polynomial (time and memory) algorithm for estimating the probability that its meets a deadline, or, alternately, that its {\em makespan} is less…
Classical approach of solvability problem has shed much light on what we can solve and what we cannot solve mathematically. Starting with quadratic equation, we know that we can solve it by the quadratic formula which uses square root.…
Obtaining lower bounds for NP-hard problems has for a long time been an active area of research. Recent algebraic techniques introduced by Jonsson et al. (SODA 2013) show that the time complexity of the parameterized SAT($\cdot$) problem…
Given a neural network, training data, and a threshold, it was known that it is NP-hard to find weights for the neural network such that the total error is below the threshold. We determine the algorithmic complexity of this fundamental…
Many researchers in artificial intelligence are beginning to explore the use of soft constraints to express a set of (possibly conflicting) problem requirements. A soft constraint is a function defined on a collection of variables which…
We propose a novel Linear Program (LP) based formula- tion for solving jigsaw puzzles. We formulate jigsaw solving as a set of successive global convex relaxations of the stan- dard NP-hard formulation, that can describe both jigsaws with…