Related papers: How Pinball Wizards Simulate a Turing Machine
It is shown that the toy Turing Tumble, suitably extended with an infinitely long game board and unlimited supply of pieces, is Turing-Complete. This is achieved via direct simulation of a Turing machine. Unlike previously informally…
We show that two-dimensional billiard systems are Turing complete, in the sense that the halting of any Turing machine with a given input is equivalent to a certain bounded trajectory in this system entering a specified open set. Billiards…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
We consider the periodic Manhattan lattice with alternating orientations going north-south and east-west. Place obstructions on vertices independently with probability $0<p<1$. A particle is moving on the edges with unit speed following the…
The labyrinth game is a simple yet challenging platform, not only for humans but also for control algorithms and systems. The game is easy to understand but still very hard to master. From a system point of view, the ball behaviour is in…
We investigate algorithmic control of a large swarm of mobile particles (such as robots, sensors, or building material) that move in a 2D workspace using a global input signal (such as gravity or a magnetic field). We show that a maze of…
The Turing machine, as it was presented by Turing himself, models the calculations done by a person. This means that we can compute whatever any Turing machine can compute, and therefore we are Turing complete. The question addressed here…
The Windows Scheduling Problem, also known as the Pinwheel Problem, is to schedule periodic jobs subject to their processing frequency demands. Instances are given as a set of jobs that have to be processed infinitely often such that the…
We demonstrate that the free motion of any two-dimensional rigid body colliding elastically with two parallel, flat walls is equivalent to a billiard system. Using this equivalence, we analyze the integrable and chaotic properties of this…
The problem of two interacting particles moving in a d-dimensional billiard is considered here. A suitable coordinate transformation leads to the problem of a particle in an unconventional hyperbilliard. A dynamical map can be readily…
"Bubble Ball" is a game built on a 2D physics engine, where a finite set of objects can modify the motion of a bubble-like ball. The objective is to choose the set and the initial configuration of the objects, in order to get the ball to…
Systems of pinned billiard balls serve as simplified models of collisions, where all particles remain fixed in their positions while their (pseudo-)velocities evolve in accordance with the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. For…
Inspired by the Japanese game Pachinko, we study simple (perfectly "inelastic" collisions) dynamics of a unit ball falling amidst point obstacles (pins) in the plane. A classic example is that a checkerboard grid of pins produces the…
This paper explores and clarifies several issues surrounding Zeno machines and the issue of running a Turing machine for infinite time. Without a minimum hypothetical bound on physical conditions, any magical machine can be created, and…
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…
A tennis ball is not expected to penetrate through a brick wall since a motion under a barrier is impossible in classical mechanics. With quantum effects a motion of a particle through a barrier is allowed due to quantum tunneling.…
The ball-constrained weighted maximin dispersion problem $(\rm P_{ball})$ is to find a point in an $n$-dimensional Euclidean ball such that the minimum of the weighted Euclidean distance from given $m$ points is maximized. We propose a new…
We call a system bouncing ball billiard if it consists of a particle that is subjected to a constant vertical force and bounces inelastically on a one-dimendional vibrating periodically corrugated floor. Here we choose circular scatterers…
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…