Related papers: Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate

We provide a complete characterization for the computational complexity of finding approximate equilibria in two-action graphical games. We consider the two most well-studied approximation notions: $\varepsilon$-Nash equilibria…

This study examines the computational complexity of the decision problem modeled on the smartphone game Bus Out. The objective of the game is to load all the passengers in a queue onto appropriate buses using a limited number of bus parking…

In this paper, we introduce the problem of Matroid-Constrained Vertex Cover: given a graph with weights on the edges and a matroid imposed on the vertices, our problem is to choose a subset of vertices that is independent in the matroid,…

Given a set of squares and a strip of bounded width and infinite height, we consider a square strip packaging problem, which we call the square independent packing problem (SIPP), to minimize the strip height so that all the squares are…

Tantrix is a puzzle to make a loop by connecting lines drawn on hexagonal tiles, and the objective of this research is to solve it by a computer. For this purpose, we give a problem setting of solving Tantrix as arranging tiles in an…

We introduce the game of Cops and Eternal Robbers played on graphs, where there are infinitely many robbers that appear sequentially over distinct plays of the game. A positive integer $t$ is fixed, and the cops are required to capture the…

We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 2D, improving an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99]. The puzzle, inspired by the game *PushPush*, consists of unit square blocks on an integer…

In recent work of Hazan and Krauthgamer (SICOMP 2011), it was shown that finding an $\eps$-approximate Nash equilibrium with near-optimal value in a two-player game is as hard as finding a hidden clique of size $O(\log n)$ in the random…

The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…

Pebble games are popular models for analyzing time-space trade-offs. In particular, the reversible pebble game is often applied in quantum algorithms like Grover's search to efficiently simulate classical computation on inputs in…

We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…

In repeated games, players choose actions concurrently at each step. We consider a parameterized setting of repeated games in which the players form a population of an arbitrary size. Their utility functions encode a reachability objective.…

Burke and Teng introduced a two-player combinatorial game Atropos based on Sperner's lemma, and showed that deciding whether one has a winning strategy for Atropos is PSPACE-complete. In the original Atropos game, the players must color a…

Here several perfect simulation algorithms are brought under a single framework, and shown to derive from the same probabilistic result, called here the Fundamental Theorem of Perfect Simulation (FTPS). An exact simulation algorithm has…

We consider the problem of assigning radii to a given set of points in the plane, such that the resulting set of circles is connected, and the sum of radii is minimized. We show that the problem is polynomially solvable if a connectivity…

Infinitely repeated games support equilibrium concepts beyond those present in one-shot games (e.g., cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma). Nonetheless, repeated games fail to capture our real-world intuition for settings with many…

Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value…

We consider the pebble game on DAGs with bounded fan-in introduced in [Paterson and Hewitt '70] and the reversible version of this game in [Bennett '89], and study the question of how hard it is to decide exactly or approximately the number…

At some places (see the references) Martin Erickson describes a certain game: "Two players alternately write O's (first player) and X's (second player) in the unoccupied cells of an n x n grid. The first player (if any) to occupy four cells…

Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…