Related papers: Sorting by pile shuffles on queue-like and stack-l…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
Consider an n by n array of cards shuffled in the following manner. An element x of the array is chosen uniformly at random; Then with probability 1/2 the rectangle of cards above and to the left of x is rotated 180 degrees, and with…
We consider algorithmic problems motivated by modular robotic reconfiguration in the sliding square model, in which we are given $n$ square-shaped modules in a (labeled or unlabeled) start configuration and need to find a schedule of…
A Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds (GSR) shuffle is performed on a deck of $N$ cards by cutting the top $n\sim Bin(N,1/2)$ cards and interleaving the two resulting piles uniformly at random. The celebrated "Seven shuffles suffice" theorem of…
In this paper, we are interested in parallel identical machine scheduling problems with preemption and release dates in case of a regular criterion to be minimized. We show that solutions having a permutation flow shop structure are…
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…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
We study sorting algorithms based on randomized round-robin comparisons. Specifically, we study Spin-the-bottle sort, where comparisons are unrestricted, and Annealing sort, where comparisons are restricted to a distance bounded by a…
We study a new reconfiguration problem inspired by classic mechanical puzzles: a colored token is placed on each vertex of a given graph; we are also given a set of distinguished cycles on the graph. We are tasked with rearranging the…
We study the set of all pseudoline arrangements with contact points which cover a given support. We define a natural notion of flip between these arrangements and study the graph of these flips. In particular, we provide an enumeration…
This paper is about the following question: How many riffle shuffles mix a deck of card for games such as blackjack and bridge? An object that comes up in answering this question is the descent polynomial associated with pairs of decks,…
In this paper we study several variations of the \emph{pancake flipping problem}, which is also well known as the problem of \emph{sorting by prefix reversals}. We consider the variations in the sorting process by adding with prefix…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…
We study a family of maps from $S_n \to S_n$ we call fixed point homing shuffles. These maps generalize a few known problems such as Conway's Topswops, and a card shuffling process studied by Gweneth McKinley. We show that the iterates of…
In this work we propose a heuristic algorithm for the layout optimization for disks installed in a rotating circular container. This is a unequal circle packing problem with additional balance constraints. It proved to be an NP-hard…
Routing and scheduling problems are fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization, and also have many applications. Most variations of these problems are NP-Hard, so we need to use heuristics to solve these problems on large instances,…
We propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
By a well-known result of Bayer and Diaconis, the maximum entropy model of the common riffle shuffle implies that the number of riffle shuffles necessary to mix a standard deck of 52 cards is either 7 or 11--with the former number applying…
An archetypal problem discussed in computer science is the problem of searching for a given number in a given set of numbers. Other than sequential search, the classic solution is to sort the list of numbers and then apply binary search.…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…