Related papers: King Chasing Problem in Chinese Chess is NP-hard
Number the cells of a (possibly infinite) chessboard in some way with the numbers 0, 1, 2, ... Consider the cells in order, placing a queen in a cell if and only if it would not attack any earlier queen. The problem is to determine the…
Snake is a classic computer game, which has been around for decades. Based on this game, we study the game of Snake on arbitrary undirected graphs. A snake forms a simple path that has to move to an apple while avoiding colliding with…
The constraint satisfaction problems k-SAT and Quantum k-SAT (k-QSAT) are canonical NP-complete and QMA_1-complete problems (for k>=3), respectively, where QMA_1 is a quantum generalization of NP with one-sided error. Whereas k-SAT has been…
Decision-theoretic troubleshooting is one of the areas to which Bayesian networks can be applied. Given a probabilistic model of a malfunctioning man-made device, the task is to construct a repair strategy with minimal expected cost. The…
Public goods games in undirected networks are generally known to have pure Nash equilibria, which are easy to find. In contrast, we prove that, in directed networks, a broad range of public goods games have intractable equilibrium problems:…
This paper aims to formulate and study the inverse problem of non-cooperative linear quadratic games: Given a profile of control strategies, find cost parameters for which this profile of control strategies is Nash. We formulate the problem…
In this paper, the problem of finding a generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) of a networked game is studied. Players are only able to choose their decisions from a feasible action set. The feasible set is considered to be a private linear…
The concept of leader--follower (or Stackelberg) equilibrium plays a central role in a number of real--world applications of game theory. While the case with a single follower has been thoroughly investigated, results with multiple…
Parity games have important practical applications in formal verification and synthesis, especially to solve the model-checking problem of the modal mu-calculus. They are also interesting from the theory perspective, because they are widely…
The standard proof of NP-Hardness of 3DM provides a power-$4$ reduction of 3SAT to 3DM. In this note, we provide a linear-time reduction. Under the exponential time hypothesis, this reduction improves the runtime lower bound from…
The Parks Puzzle is a paper-and-pencil puzzle game that is classically played on a square grid with different colored regions (the parks). The player needs to place a certain number of "trees" in each row, column, and park such that none…
Consider an undirected graph modeling a social network, where the vertices represent users, and the edges do connections among them. In the competitive diffusion game, each of a number of players chooses a vertex as a seed to propagate…
We consider an extension of a noncooperative game problem where players have joint binding constraints. In this case, justification of a generalized equilibrium point needs a reasonable mechanism for attaining this state. We suggest to…
A dominating set D in a graph G is a subset of its vertices such that every vertex of the graph which does not belong to set D is adjacent to at least one vertex from set D. A set of vertices of graph G is a global dominating set if it is a…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
Automatic chess problem or puzzle composition typically involves generating and testing various different positions, sometimes using particular piece sets. Once a position has been generated, it is then usually tested for positional…
In how many ways can $n$ queens be placed on an $n \times n$ chessboard so that no two queens attack each other? This is the famous $n$-queens problem. Let $Q(n)$ denote the number of such configurations, and let $T(n)$ be the number of…
When solving k-in-a-Row games, the Hales-Jewett pairing strategy [4] is a well-known strategy to prove that specific positions are (at most) a draw. It requires two empty squares per possible winning line (group) to be marked, i.e., with a…
Sequential learning models situations where agents predict a ground truth in sequence, by using their private, noisy measurements, and the predictions of agents who came earlier in the sequence. We study sequential learning in a social…
Some classical graph problems such as finding minimal spanning tree, shortest path or maximal flow can be done efficiently. We describe slight variations of such problems which are shown to be NP-complete. Our proofs use straightforward…