Related papers: Coin-Moving Puzzles

We demonstrate that the free motion of any two-dimensional rigid body colliding elastically with two parallel, flat walls is equivalent to a billiard system. Using this equivalence, we analyze the integrable and chaotic properties of this…

We study a new reconfiguration problem inspired by classic mechanical puzzles: a colored token is placed on each vertex of a given graph; we are also given a set of distinguished cycles on the graph. We are tasked with rearranging the…

We study the dynamics of a bouncing coin whose motion is restricted to the two-dimensional plane. Such coin model is equivalent to the system of two equal masses connected by a rigid rod, making elastic collisions with a flat boundary. We…

We study a game in which one keeps flipping a coin until a given finite string of heads and tails occurs. We find the expected number of coin flips to end the game when the ending string consists of at most four maximal runs of heads or…

Two-player graph games are a fundamental model for reasoning about the interaction of agents. These games are played between two players who move a token along a graph. In bidding games, the players have some monetary budget, and at each…

We give a new proof that any candy-passing game on a graph G with at least 4|E(G)|-|V(G)| candies stabilizes. (This result was first proven in arXiv:0807.4450.) Unlike the prior literature on candy-passing games, we use methods from the…

In this paper we introduce polytopal stochastic games, an extension of two-player, zero-sum, turn-based stochastic games, in which we may have uncertainty over the transition probabilities. In these games the uncertainty over the…

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…

In a two-player zero-sum graph game, the players move a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite play, which determines the winner of the game. Bidding games are graph games in which in each turn, an auction (bidding) determines…

In this paper we consider a scenario where there are several algorithms for solving a given problem. Each algorithm is associated with a probability of success and a cost, and there is also a penalty for failing to solve the problem. The…

We report on progress in modelling and solving Puzznic, a video game requiring the player to plan sequences of moves to clear a grid by matching blocks. We focus here on levels with no moving blocks. We compare a planning approach and three…

We consider Flipping Coins, a partizan version of the impartial game Turning Turtles, played on lines of coins. We show the values of this game are numbers, and these are found by first applying a reduction, then decomposing the position…

This paper deals with sliding games, which are a variant of the better known pushpush game. On a given structure (grid, torus...), a robot can move in a specific set of directions, and stops when it hits a block or boundary of the…

We introduce a two-player game involving two tokens located at points of a fixed set. The players take turns to move a token to an unoccupied point in such a way that the distance between the two tokens is decreased. Optimal strategies for…

This paper has a twofold scope. The first one is to clarify and put in evidence the isomorphic character of two theories developed in quite different fields: on one side, threshold logic, on the other side, simple games. One of the main…

We investigate the structure of the currencies (systems of coins) for which the greedy change-making algorithm always finds an optimal solution (that is, a one with minimum number of coins). We present a series of necessary conditions that…

We introduce and study Minkowski games. These are two player games, where the players take turns to chose positions in $\mathbb{R}^d$ based on some rules. Variants include boundedness games, where one player wants to keep the positions…

Many puzzle video games, like Sokoban, involve moving some agent in a maze. The reachable locations are usually apparent for a human player, and the difficulty of the game is mainly related to performing actions on objects, such as pushing…

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…

The optimal value computation for turned-based stochastic games with reachability objectives, also known as simple stochastic games, is one of the few problems in $NP \cap coNP$ which are not known to be in $P$. However, there are some…