Related papers: Wataridori is NP-Complete
We show that deciding whether a given set of circles can be packed into a rectangle, an equilateral triangle, or a unit square are NP-hard problems, settling the complexity of these natural packing problems. On the positive side, we show…
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…
We show that determining the crossing number of a link is NP-hard. For some weaker notions of link equivalence, we also show NP-completeness.
A pattern p (i.e., a string of variables and terminals) matches a word w, if w can be obtained by uniformly replacing the variables of p by terminal words. The respective matching problem, i.e., deciding whether or not a given pattern…
We describe here an optical device, based on time-delays, for solving the set splitting problem which is well-known NP-complete problem. The device has a graph-like structure and the light is traversing it from a start node to a destination…
The Planar Contraction problem is to test whether a given graph can be made planar by using at most k edge contractions. This problem is known to be NP-complete. We show that it is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by k.
We introduce a family of reconfiguration puzzles arising from ideas in geometry and topology. We present their construction from square-tiled shapes, discuss some of the underlying mathematics and describe how they are naturally associated…
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…
Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this…
Evolomino is a pencil-and-paper logic puzzle published by the Japanese company Nikoli, renowned for culture-independent puzzles such as Sudoku, Kakuro, and Slitherlink. Its name reflects the core mechanic: the polyomino-like blocks drawn by…
A matching is a set of edges in a graph with no common endpoint. A matching M is called acyclic if the induced subgraph on the endpoints of the edges in M is acyclic. Given a graph G and an integer k, Acyclic Matching Problem seeks for an…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
In this work, we prove the NP-completeness of two variants of tokenisation, defined as the problem of compressing a dataset to at most $\delta$ symbols by either finding a vocabulary directly (direct tokenisation), or selecting a sequence…
We prove that the classic falling-block video game Tetris (both survival and board clearing) remains NP-complete even when restricted to 8 columns, or to 4 rows, settling open problems posed over 15 years ago [BDH+04]. Our reduction is from…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in $R^{d}$, a tour is a closed simple path that covers all the given points, i.e. a Hamiltonian cycle. % In $P$ if no three points are collinear then the points are said to be in general position. A…
The NP-complete Permutation Pattern Matching problem asks whether a permutation P (the pattern) can be matched into a permutation T (the text). A matching is an order-preserving embedding of P into T. In the Generalized Permutation Pattern…
Kingdomino is a board game designed by Bruno Cathala and edited by Blue Orange since 2016. The goal is to place $2 \times 1$ dominoes on a grid layout, and get a better score than other players. Each $1 \times 1$ domino cell has a color…
We show that the classical game LaserTank is $\mathrm{NP}$-complete, even when the tank movement is restricted to a single column and the only blocks appearing on the board are mirrors and solid blocks. We show this by reducing $3$-SAT…
Computational complexity of the design problem for a network with a target value of Region-Based Component Decomposition Number (RBCDN) has been proven to be NP-complete.
Solving a Radon-Kaczmarz puzzle involves filling a square grid with positive integers, each between one and nine, satisfying certain clues coming from the sum of entries that lie on the same line in the square grid. Given a set of slopes…