Related papers: Mastermind is NP-Complete

We prove that the 2017 puzzle game ZHED is NP-complete, even with just 1 tiles. Such a puzzle is defined by a set of unit-square 1 tiles in a square grid, and a target square of the grid. A move consists of selecting an unselected 1 tile…

Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…

We determine the exact threshold of satisfiability for random instances of a particular NP-complete constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). This is the first random CSP model for which we have determined a precise linear satisfiability…

We show that the classical game LaserTank is $\mathrm{NP}$-complete, even when the tank movement is restricted to a single column and the only blocks appearing on the board are mirrors and solid blocks. We show this by reducing $3$-SAT…

Many natural combinatorial problems can be expressed as constraint satisfaction problems. This class of problems is known to be NP-complete in general, but certain restrictions on the form of the constraints can ensure tractability. The…

Mastermind is famous two-players game. The first player (codemaker) chooses a secret code which the second player (codebreaker) is supposed to crack within a minimum number of code guesses (queries). Therefore, codemaker's duty is to help…

Many natural optimization problems derived from $\sf NP$ admit bilevel and multilevel extensions in which decisions are made sequentially by multiple players with conflicting objectives, as in interdiction, adversarial selection, and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in language understanding and have been successfully applied to a variety of real-world tasks through task-specific fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Despite these…

This project investigates the potential of computers to solve complex tasks such as games. The paper proves that the complexity of a generalized version of spider solitaire is NP-Complete and uses much of structure of the proof that…

"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…

Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are a natural class of decision problems where one must decide whether there is an assignment to variables that satisfies a given formula. Schaefer's dichotomy theorem, and its extension to all…

Itemset mining is one of the most studied tasks in knowledge discovery. In this paper we analyze the computational complexity of three central itemset mining problems. We prove that mining confident rules with a given item in the head is…

We prove that persuasion is an NP-complete problem.

Mixed-integer quadratic programming is the problem of optimizing a quadratic function over points in a polyhedral set where some of the components are restricted to be integral. In this paper, we prove that the decision version of…

The question of whether the complexity class P is equal to the complexity class NP has been a seemingly intractable problem for over 4 decades. It has been clear that if an algorithm existed that would solve the problems in the NP class in…

There has been a great of work on characterizing the complexity of the satisfiability and validity problem for modal logics. In particular, Ladner showed that the validity problem for all logics between K, T, and S4 is {\sl…

In the past three decades, deductive games have become interesting from the algorithmic point of view. Deductive games are two players zero sum games of imperfect information. The first player, called "codemaker", chooses a secret code and…

Constraint Satisfaction Problem on finite sets is known to be NP-complete in general but certain restrictions on the constraint language can ensure tractability. It was proved that if a constraint language has a weak near unanimity…

We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…

Since the 1960s Mastermind has been studied for the combinatorial and information theoretical interest the game has to offer. Many results have been discovered starting with Erd\H{o}s and R\'enyi determining the optimal number of queries…