Related papers: Evolomino is NP-complete
A sliding puzzle is a combination puzzle where a player slide pieces along certain routes on a board to reach a certain end-configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel measurement of complexity of massive sliding puzzles with…
Many classical theorems in combinatorics establish the emergence of substructures within sufficiently large collections of objects. Well-known examples are Ramsey's theorem on monochromatic subgraphs and the Erd\H{o}s-Rado sunflower lemma.…
The Decodoku project seeks to let users get hands-on with cutting-edge quantum research through a set of simple puzzle games. The design of these games is explicitly based on the problem of decoding qudit variants of surface codes. This…
{\sc ParMooN} is a program package for the numerical solution of elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations. It inherits the distinct features of its predecessor {\sc MooNMD} \cite{JM04}: strict decoupling of geometry and finite…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
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…
Satisfiability of Boolean circuits is among the most known and important problems in theoretical computer science. This problem is NP-complete in general but becomes polynomial time when restricted either to monotone gates or linear gates.…
The poset cover problem seeks a minimum set of partial orders whose linear extensions cover a given set of linear orders. Recognizing its NP-completeness, we devised a non-trivial reduction to the Boolean satisfiability problem using a…
Exactly 20 years ago at MFCS, Demaine posed the open problem whether the game of Dots & Boxes is PSPACE-complete. Dots & Boxes has been studied extensively, with for instance a chapter in Berlekamp et al. "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical…
The mathematical structure of the widely popular Sudoku puzzles is akin to typical hard constraint satisfaction problems that lie at the heart of many applications, including protein folding and the general problem of finding the ground…
We consider the problem of deciding, given a sequence of regions, if there is a choice of points, one for each region, such that the induced polyline is simple or weakly simple, meaning that it can touch but not cross itself. Specifically,…
The problem of P vs. NP is very serious, and solutions to the problem can help save lives. This article is an attempt at solving the problem using a computer algorithm. It is presented in a fashion that will hopefully allow for easy…
Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…
There is no known polynomial-time algorithm that can solve an NP problem. Evolutionary search has been shown to be a viable method of finding acceptable solutions within a reasonable time period. Recently quantum computers have surfaced as…
We prove that two pushing-blocks puzzles are intractable in 2D. One of our constructions improves an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99] for a puzzle inspired by the game PushPush. The second construction answers a…
Scoring protocols are a broad class of voting systems. Each is defined by a vector $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2,...,\alpha_m)$, $\alpha_1 \geq \alpha_2 \geq >... \geq \alpha_m$, of integers such that each voter contributes $\alpha_1$ points to…
We address a discrete tomography problem that arises in the study of the atomic structure of crystal lattices. A polyatomic structure T can be defined as an integer lattice in dimension D>=2, whose points may be occupied by $c$ distinct…
We analyze a directed variation of the book embedding problem when the page partition is prespecified and the nodes on the spine must be in topological order (upward book embedding). Given a directed acyclic graph and a partition of its…
In games with imperfect recall, players may forget the sequence of decisions they made in the past. When players also forget whether they have already encountered their current decision point, they are said to be absent-minded. Solving…
Traditional Support Vector Machines (SVMs) need pre-wired finite time windows to predict and classify time series. They do not have an internal state necessary to deal with sequences involving arbitrary long-term dependencies. Here we…