Related papers: The Complexity of Clickomania
Graph parameters such as the clique number, the chromatic number, and the independence number are central in many areas, ranging from computer networks to linguistics to computational neuroscience to social networks. In particular, the…
"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…
The list coloring problem is a variation of the classical vertex coloring problem, extensively studied in recent years, where each vertex has a restricted list of allowed colors, and having some variations as the $(\gamma,\mu)$-coloring,…
We play a variation of Nim on stacks of tokens. Take your favorite increasing sequence of positive integers and color the tokens according to the following rule. Each token on a level that corresponds to a number in the sequence is colored…
Bloxorz is an online puzzle game where players move a 1 by 1 by 2 block by tilting it on a subset of the two dimensional grid. Bloxorz features switches that open and close trapdoors. The puzzle is to move the block from its initial…
We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n by n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles…
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…
In combinatorial reconfiguration, the reconfiguration problems on a vertex subset (e.g., an independent set) are well investigated. In these problems, some tokens are placed on a subset of vertices of the graph, and there are three natural…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
A $k$-coloring of a tournament is a partition of its vertices into $k$ acyclic sets. Deciding if a tournament is 2-colorable is NP-hard. A natural problem, akin to that of coloring a 3-colorable graph with few colors, is to color a…
The class of passable games was recently introduced by Selinger as a class of combinatorial games that are suitable for modelling monotone set coloring games such as Hex. In a monotone set coloring game, the players alternately color the…
The Game of Poker Chips, Dominoes and Survival fosters team building and high level cooperation in large groups, and is a tool applied in management training exercises. Each player, initially given two colored poker chips, is allowed to…
Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with…
This work establishes the complexity class of several instances of the S-packing coloring problem: for a graph G, a positive integer k and a non decreasing list of integers S = (s\_1 , ..., s\_k ), G is S-colorable, if its vertices can be…
Clobber is a new two-player board game. In this paper, we introduce the one-player variant Solitaire Clobber where the goal is to remove as many stones as possible from the board by alternating white and black moves. We show that a…
Our goal is to prove new results in graph theory and combinatorics thanks to the speed of computers, used with smart algorithms. We tackle four problems. The four-colour theorem states that any map whose countries are connected can be…
This work shows new results on the complexity of games Jelly-No and Hanano with various constraints on the size of the board and number of colours. Hanano and Jelly-No are one-player, 2D side-view puzzle games with a dynamic board…
Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…
We consider the distributed complexity of the (degree+1)-list coloring problem, in which each node $u$ of degree $d(u)$ is assigned a palette of $d(u)+1$ colors, and the goal is to find a proper coloring using these color palettes. The…
In an article [3] published recently in this journal, it was shown that when k >= 3, the problem of deciding whether the distinguishing chromatic number of a graph is at most k is NP-hard. We consider the problem when k = 2. In regards to…