Related papers: King Chasing Problem in Chinese Chess is NP-hard
The domination problem and several of its variants (total domination, 2-domination and secure domination) are considered. These problems have various real-world applications, but are NP-hard to solve to provable optimality, making fast…
The decision problems of the existence of a Hamiltonian cycle or of a Hamiltonian path in a given graph, and of the existence of a truth assignment satisfying a given Boolean formula $C$, are well-known {\it NP}-complete problems. Here we…
Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…
We apply several quantization schemes to simple versions of the Chinos game. Classically, for two players with one coin each, there is a symmetric stable strategy that allows each player to win half of the times on average. A partial…
We consider the popular matching problem in a roommates instance with strict preference lists. While popular matchings always exist in a bipartite instance, they need not exist in a roommates instance. The complexity of the popular matching…
We study the complexity of solving two-player infinite duration games played on a fixed finite graph, where the control of a node is not predetermined but rather assigned randomly. In classic random-turn games, control of each node is…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…
Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a secret word $w$ that has been chosen from a dictionary $D$. In order to discover $w$, the player can make at most $\ell$ guesses, which must also be words from…
Link prediction is one of the fundamental problems in social network analysis. A common set of techniques for link prediction rely on similarity metrics which use the topology of the observed subnetwork to quantify the likelihood of…
The twentieth century has seen the rise of a new type of video games targeted at a mass audience of "casual" gamers. Many of these games require the player to swap items in order to form matches of three and are collectively known as…
We introduce a new bilevel version of the classic shortest path problem and completely characterize its computational complexity with respect to several problem variants. In our problem, the leader and the follower each control a subset of…
The generalised Sudoku problem with $N$ symbols is known to be NP-complete, and hence is equivalent to any other NP-complete problem, even for the standard restricted version where $N$ is a perfect square. In particular, generalised Sudoku…
In this work, we have introduced two innovative quantum algorithms: the Direct Column Algorithm and the Quantum Backtracking Algorithm to solve N-Queens problem, which involves the arrangement of $N$ queens on an $N \times N$ chessboard…
In many combinatorial games, one can prove that the first player wins under best play using a simple but non-constructive argument called strategy-stealing. This work is about the complexity behind these proofs: how hard is it to actually…
In the context of multi-player, general-sum games, there is an increasing interest in solution concepts modeling some form of communication among players, since they can lead to socially better outcomes with respect to Nash equilibria, and…
A placement of chess pieces on a chessboard is called dominating, if each free square of the chessboard is under attack by at least one piece. In this contribution we compute the number of dominating arrangements of $k$ rooks on an $n\times…
In this paper, we examine Yangjun Chen's technical report titled ``The 2-MAXSAT Problem Can Be Solved in Polynomial Time'' [Che23], which revises and expands upon their conference paper of the same name [Che22]. Chen's paper purports to…
We consider the chessboard pebbling problem analyzed by Chung, Graham, Morrison and Odlyzko [3]. We study the number of reachable configurations $G(k)$ and a related double sequence $G(k,m)$. Exact expressions for these are derived, and we…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm that always finds an (approximate) Nash equilibrium for repeated two-player stochastic games. The algorithm exploits the folk theorem to derive a strategy profile that forms an equilibrium by…
In an Avoider-Enforcer game, we are given a hypergraph. Avoider and Enforcer alternate in claiming an unclaimed vertex, until all the vertices of the hypergraph are claimed. Enforcer wins if Avoider claims all vertices of an edge; Avoider…