Related papers: The Complexity of Clickomania
We study three problems related to the computational complexity of the popular game Minesweeper. The first is consistency: given a set of clues, is there any arrangement of mines that satisfies it? This problem has been known to be…
Graph Coloring is probably one of the most studied and famous problem in graph algorithms. Exact methods fail to solve instances with more than few hundred vertices, therefore, a large number of heuristics have been proposed. Nested Monte…
Hedonic diversity games are a variant of the classical Hedonic games designed to better model a variety of questions concerning diversity and fairness. Previous works mainly targeted the case with two diversity classes (represented as…
We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…
Jigsaw puzzle solving, the problem of constructing a coherent whole from a set of non-overlapping unordered visual fragments, is fundamental to numerous applications, and yet most of the literature of the last two decades has focused thus…
In a monotonic sequence game, two players alternately choose elements of a sequence from some fixed ordered set. The game ends when the resulting sequence contains either an ascending subsequence of length a or a descending one of length d.…
Ball sort puzzle is a popular logic puzzle consisting of several bins containing balls of multiple colors. Each bin works like a stack; a ball has to follow the last-in first-out order. The player has to sort the balls by color such that…
In this paper we study colorings (or tilings) of the two-dimensional grid $\mathbb{Z}^2$. A coloring is said to be valid with respect to a set $P$ of $n\times m$ rectangular patterns if all $n\times m$ sub-patterns of the coloring are in…
We study a recently introduced two-person combinatorial game, the $(a,b)$-monochromatic clique transversal game which is played by Alice and Bob on a graph $G$. As we observe, this game is equivalent to the $(b,a)$-biased Maker-Breaker game…
A query game is a pair of a set $Q$ of queries and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of functions, or codewords $f:Q\rightarrow \mathbb{Z}.$ We think of this as a two-player game. One player, Codemaker, picks a hidden codeword $f\in \mathcal{F}$. The…
We consider the following two-player game: Maxi and Mini start with the empty graph on $n$ vertices and take turns, always adding one additional edge to the graph such that the chromatic number is at most $k$, where $k \in \mathbb{N}$ is a…
Consider $n^2-1$ unit-square blocks in an $n \times n$ square board, where each block is labeled as movable horizontally (only), movable vertically (only), or immovable -- a variation of Rush Hour with only $1 \times 1$ cars and fixed…
Lights Out! is a game played on a $5 \times 5$ grid of lights, or more generally on a graph. Pressing lights on the grid allows the player to turn off neighboring lights. The goal of the game is to start with a given initial configuration…
We introduce higher-dimensional cubical sliding puzzles that are inspired by the classical 15 Puzzle from the 1880s. In our puzzles, on a $d$-dimensional cube, a labeled token can be slid from one vertex to another if it is topologically…
We consider the problem of clique coloring, that is, coloring the vertices of a given graph such that no (maximal) clique of size at least two is monocolored. It is known that interval graphs are $2$-clique colorable. In this paper we prove…
The intractability of any problem and the randomness of its solutions have an obvious intuitive connection. However, the challenge till now has been that there is no practical way to firmly establish if the solution to a problem is actually…
The rank of a bimatrix game is the matrix rank of the sum of the two payoff matrices. This paper comprehensively analyzes games of rank one, and shows the following: (1) For a game of rank r, the set of its Nash equilibria is the…
Consider the following game. We are given a tree $T$ and two players (say) Alice and Bob who alternately colour an edge of a tree (using one of $k$ colours). If all edges of the tree get coloured, then Alice wins else Bob wins. Game…
Strategic interactions can be represented more concisely, and analyzed and solved more efficiently, if we are aware of the symmetries within the multiagent system. Symmetries also have conceptual implications, for example for equilibrium…
Leadership games provide a powerful paradigm to model many real-world settings. Most literature focuses on games with a single follower who acts optimistically, breaking ties in favour of the leader. Unfortunately, for real-world…