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We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n by n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles…
Deciding whether a graph can be embedded in a grid using only unit-length edges is NP-complete, even when restricted to binary trees. However, it is not difficult to devise a number of graph classes for which the problem is polynomial, even…
Most approaches to the synthesis of reactive systems study the problem in terms of a two-player game with complete observation. In many applications, however, the system's environment consists of several distinct entities, and the system…
Holzer and Holzer (Discrete Applied Mathematics 144(3):345--358, 2004) proved that the Tantrix(TM) rotation puzzle problem with four colors is NP-complete, and they showed that the infinite variant of this problem is undecidable. In this…
Permutation Pattern Matching (or PPM) is a decision problem whose input is a pair of permutations $\pi$ and $\tau$, represented as sequences of integers, and the task is to determine whether $\tau$ contains a subsequence order-isomorphic to…
The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and…
We systematically study the computational complexity of a broad class of computational problems in phylogenetic reconstruction. The class contains for example the rooted triple consistency problem, forbidden subtree problems, the quartet…
We introduce the complexity class Quantified Reals ($\text{Q}\mathbb{R}$). Let FOTR be the set of true sentences in the first-order theory of the reals. A language $L$ is in $\text{Q}\mathbb{R}$, if there is a polynomial time reduction from…
In this study, we investigate the computational complexity of some variants of generalized puzzles. We are provided with two sets S_1 and S_2 of polyominoes. The first puzzle asks us to form the same shape using polyominoes in S_1 and S_2.…
A famous result of D. Walkup is that an $m\times n$ rectangle may be tiled by T-tetrominos if and only if both $m$ and $n$ are multiples of 4. The "if" portion may be proved by tiling a $4\times 4$ block, and then copying that block to fill…
A polynomial Turing compression (PTC) for a parameterized problem $L$ is a polynomial time Turing machine that has access to an oracle for a problem $L'$ such that a polynomial in the input parameter bounds each query. Meanwhile, a…
Several computational problems in phylogenetic reconstruction can be formulated as restrictions of the following general problem: given a formula in conjunctive normal form where the literals are rooted triples, is there a rooted binary…
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…
We study the Escape Problem for discrete-time linear dynamical systems over compact semialgebraic sets. We establish a uniform upper bound on the number of iterations it takes for every orbit of a rational matrix to escape a compact…
It is well known that the kind of P systems involved in the definition of the P conjecture is able to solve problems in the complexity class $\mathbf{P}$ by leveraging the uniformity condition. Here we show that these systems are indeed…
Binets and trinets are phylogenetic networks with two and three leaves, respectively. Here we consider the problem of deciding if there exists a binary level-1 phylogenetic network displaying a given set $\mathcal{T}$ of binary binets or…
Discrete probabilistic programs (DPPs) provide a highly expressive formalism for compactly defining arbitrary finite probabilistic models. This expressivity comes at a price: DPP inference is PSPACE-hard. In this work, we show that DPP…
Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the…
Biological neural systems must be fast but are energy-constrained. Evolution's solution: act on the first signal. Winner-take-all circuits and time-to-first-spike coding implicitly treat when a neuron fires as an expression of confidence.…
This paper investigates two related optimal input selection problems for fixed (non-switched) and switched structured systems. More precisely, we consider selecting the minimum cost of inputs from a prior set of inputs, and selecting the…