Related papers: Tetris is Hard with Just One Piece Type
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
We prove that the problem of reconstructing a permutation $\pi_1,\dotsc,\pi_n$ of the integers $[1\dotso n]$ given the absolute differences $|\pi_{i+1}-\pi_i|$, $i = 1,\dotsc,n-1$ is NP-complete. As an intermediate step we first prove the…
We analyze the computational complexity of the many types of pencil-and-paper-style puzzles featured in the 2016 puzzle video game The Witness. In all puzzles, the goal is to draw a simple path in a rectangular grid graph from a start…
We revisit various PTAS's (Polynomial Time Approximation Schemes) for minimization versions of dense problems, and show that they can be performed with sublinear query complexity. This means that not only do we obtain a…
Peg solitaire is an old puzzle with a 300 year history. We consider two ways a computer can be utilized to find interesting peg solitaire puzzles. It is common for a peg solitaire puzzle to begin from a symmetric board position, we have…
Petri games are a multi-player game model for the automatic synthesis of distributed systems, where the players are represented as tokens on a Petri net and are grouped into environment players and system players. As long as the players…
Patterned self-assembly tile set synthesis (PATS) aims at finding a minimum tile set to uniquely self-assemble a given rectangular (color) pattern. For k >= 1, k-PATS is a variant of PATS that restricts input patterns to those with at most…
The closure $\textrm{cl}(R)$ of a consistent set $R$ of triples (rooted binary trees on three leaves) provides essential information about tree-like relations that are shown by any supertree that displays all triples in $R$. In this…
Consider the following puzzle: a farmland consists of several fields, each occupied by either a farmer, a fox, a chicken, or a caterpillar. Creatures in neighboring fields can swap positions as long as the fox avoids the farmer, the chicken…
We consider the problem of ranking a set of OT constraints in a manner consistent with data. We speed up Tesar and Smolensky's RCD algorithm to be linear on the number of constraints. This finds a ranking so each attested form x_i beats or…
Compilation for embedded processors can be either aggressive (time consuming cross-compilation) or just in time (embedded and usually dynamic). The heuristics used in dynamic compilation are highly constrained by limited resources, time and…
In the "Game about Squares" the task is to push unit squares on an integer lattice onto corresponding dots. A square can only be moved into one given direction. When a square is pushed onto a lattice point with an arrow the direction of the…
The most important factors which contribute to the efficiency of game-theoretical algorithms are time and game complexity. In this study, we have offered an elegant method to deal with high complexity of game theoretic multi-objective…
In this paper we present a new algorithm for solving linear programs that requires only $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{rank(A)}L)$ iterations to solve a linear program with $m$ constraints, $n$ variables, and constraint matrix $A$, and bit complexity…
Polyominoes are a subset of polygons which can be constructed from integer-length squares fused at their edges. A system of polygons P is interlocked if no subset of the polygons in P can be removed arbitrarily far away from the rest. It is…
Our ignorance of the winnability percentage of the solitaire card game `Klondike' has been described as ``one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics''. Klondike, the game in the Windows Solitaire program, is just one of many…
We give a characterization of deterministic polynomial time computation based on an algebraic structure called the resolution semiring, whose elements can be understood as logic programs or sets of rewriting rules over first-order terms.…
Muller games are played by two players moving a token along a graph; the winner is determined by the set of vertices that occur infinitely often. The central algorithmic problem is to compute the winning regions for the players. Different…
We consider the problem of embedding the Steiner points of a Steiner tree with given topology into the rectilinear plane. Thereby, the length of the path between a distinguished terminal and each other terminal must not exceed given length…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…