Related papers: PushPush and Push-1 are NP-hard in 2D
Reachability in pushdown vector addition systems with states (PVASS) is among the longest standing open problems in Theoretical Computer Science. We show that the problem is decidable in full generality. Our decision procedure is similar in…
We prove that the classic falling-block video game Tetris (both survival and board clearing) remains NP-complete even when restricted to 8 columns, or to 4 rows, settling open problems posed over 15 years ago [BDH+04]. Our reduction is from…
We prove RE-completeness (and thus undecidability) of several 2D games in the Super Mario Bros. platform video game series: the New Super Mario Bros. series (original, Wii, U, and 2), and both Super Mario Maker games in all five game styles…
In this paper, we study the program-point reachability problem of concurrent pushdown systems that communicate via unbounded and unordered message buffers. Our goal is to relax the common restriction that messages can only be retrieved by a…
We study two-player multi-weighted reachability games played on a finite directed graph, where an agent, called P1, has several quantitative reachability objectives that he wants to optimize against an antagonistic environment, called P2.…
We prove that for every $d\geq 2$, deciding if a pure, $d$-dimensional, simplicial complex is shellable is NP-hard, hence NP-complete. This resolves a question raised, e.g., by Danaraj and Klee in 1978. Our reduction also yields that for…
A turn in a computation of a pushdown automaton is a switch from a phase in which the height of the pushdown store increases to a phase in which it decreases. Given a pushdown or one-counter automaton, we consider, for each string in its…
We show that packing axis-aligned unit squares into a simple polygon $P$ is NP-hard, even when $P$ is an orthogonal and orthogonally convex polygon with half-integer coordinates. It has been known since the early 80s that packing unit…
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…
Multi-stack pushdown systems are a well-studied model of concurrent computation using threads with first-order procedure calls. While, in general, reachability is undecidable, there are numerous restrictions on stack behaviour that lead to…
We study the first-order model checking problem on two generalisations of pushdown graphs. The first class is the class of nested pushdown trees. The other is the class of collapsible pushdown graphs. Our main results are the following.…
This paper develops the theory of pushdown dimension and explores its relationship with finite-state dimension. Pushdown dimension is trivially bounded above by finite-state dimension for all sequences, since a pushdown gambler can simulate…
A pushdown vector addition system with states (PVASS) extends the model of vector addition systems with a pushdown store. A PVASS is said to be \emph{bidirected} if every transition (pushing/popping a symbol or modifying a counter) has an…
Visibly pushdown transducers form a subclass of pushdown transducers that (strictly) extends finite state transducers with a stack. Like visibly pushdown automata, the input symbols determine the stack operations. In this paper, we prove…
We study pushdown vector addition systems, which are synchronized products of pushdown automata with vector addition systems. The question of the boundedness of the reachability set for this model can be refined into two decision problems…
We introduce the first complete formal solution to corrigibility in the off-switch game, with provable guarantees in multi-step, partially observed environments. Our framework consists of five *structurally separate* utility heads --…
Using the notion of visibility representations, our paper establishes a new property of instances of the Nondeterministic Constraint Logic (NCL) problem (a PSPACE-complete problem that is very convenient to prove the PSPACE-hardness of…
We study versions of cop and robber pursuit-evasion games on the visibility graphs of polygons, and inside polygons with straight and curved sides. Each player has full information about the other player's location, players take turns, and…
We study a two-dimensional generalization of the classical Bin Packing problem, denoted as 2D Demand Bin Packing. In this context, each bin is a horizontal timeline, and rectangular tasks (representing electric appliances or computational…
We show that computing the interleaving distance between two multi-graded persistence modules is NP-hard. More precisely, we show that deciding whether two modules are $1$-interleaved is NP-complete, already for bigraded, interval…