Related papers: Permutation Match Puzzles: How Young Tanvi Learned…

We continue the study of Adin, Alon and Roichman [arXiv:2502.14398, 2025] on the number of steps required to sort $n$ labelled points on a circle by transpositions. Imagine that the vertices of a cycle of length $n$ are labelled by the…

Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…

We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…

Recall that an excedance of a permutation $\pi$ is any position $i$ such that $\pi_i > i$. Inspired by the work of Hopkins, McConville and Propp (Elec. J. Comb., 2017) on sorting using toppling, we say that a permutation is toppleable if it…

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…

We consider the problem of upper bounding the number of circular transpositions needed to sort a permutation. It is well known that any permutation can be sorted using at most $n(n-1)/2$ adjacent transpositions. We show that, if we allow…

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…

This paper introduces a new reconfiguration problem of matchings in a triangular grid graph. In this problem, we are given a nearly perfect matching in which each matching edge is labeled, and aim to transform it to a target matching by…

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…

A permutation p is realized by the shift on N symbols if there is an infinite word on an N-letter alphabet whose successive left shifts by one position are lexicographically in the same relative order as p. The set of realized permutations…

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…

Learning visual features from unlabeled image data is an important yet challenging task, which is often achieved by training a model on some annotation-free information. We consider spatial contexts, for which we solve so-called jigsaw…

In this paper I present a conjecture for a recursive algorithm that finds each permutation of combining two sets of objects (AKA the Shuffle Product). This algorithm provides an efficient way to navigate this problem, as each atomic…

In the well-known Minimum Linear Arrangement problem (MinLA), the goal is to arrange the nodes of an undirected graph into a permutation so that the total stretch of the edges is minimized. This paper studies an online (learning) variant of…

Denote by $A_n$ the set of square $(0,1)$ matrices of order $n$. The set $A_n$, $n\le8$, is partitioned into row/column permutation equivalence classes enabling derivation of various facts by simple counting. For example, the number of…

Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with…

We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…

An unconstrained crossword puzzle is a generalization of the constrained crossword problem. In this problem, only the word vocabulary, and optionally the grid dimensions are known. Hence, it not only requires the algorithm to determine the…

We introduce an algorithm that conjectures the structure of a permutation class in the form of a disjoint cover of "rules"; similar to generalized grid classes. The cover is usually easily verified by a human and translated into an…

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…