Related papers: Mastermind is NP-Complete
In mean-payoff games, the objective of the protagonist is to ensure that the limit average of an infinite sequence of numeric weights is nonnegative. In energy games, the objective is to ensure that the running sum of weights is always…
We analyze the classic board game of Mastermind with $n$ holes and a constant number of colors. A result of Chv\'atal (Combinatorica 3 (1983), 325-329) states that the codebreaker can find the secret code with $\Theta(n / \log n)$…
We consider Stackelberg pricing games, which are also known as bilevel pricing problems, or combinatorial price-setting problems. This family of problems consists of games between two players: the leader and the follower. There is a market…
The question of whether all problems in NP class are also in P class is generally considered one of the most important open questions in mathematics and theoretical computer science as it has far-reaching consequences to other problems in…
The problem of designing NLP solvers for math word problems (MWP) has seen sustained research activity and steady gains in the test accuracy. Since existing solvers achieve high performance on the benchmark datasets for elementary level…
A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a computational problem where the input consists of a finite set of variables and a finite set of constraints, and where the task is to decide whether there exists a satisfying assignment of values…
What makes a computational problem easy (e.g., in P, that is, solvable in polynomial time) or hard (e.g., NP-hard)? This fundamental question now has a satisfactory answer for a quite broad class of computational problems, so called…
We show that, by using multiplicative weights in a game-theoretic thought experiment (and an important convexity result on the composition of multiplicative weights with the relative entropy function), a symmetric bimatrix game (that is, a…
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) typically have many solutions that satisfy all constraints. Often though, some solutions are preferred over others, that is, some solutions dominate other solutions. We present solution dominance as a…
We consider the computational complexity of Hearthstone which is a popular online CCG (collectible card game). We reduce a PSPACE-complete problem, the partition game, to perfect information Hearthstone in which there is no hidden…
We conjecture that PPAD has a PCP-like complete problem, seeking a near equilibrium in which all but very few players have very little incentive to deviate. We show that, if one assumes that this problem requires exponential time, several…
Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a well-studied combinatorial search problem, in which we are asked to find an assignment of values to given variables so as to satisfy all of given constraints. We study a reconfiguration variant of…
We convert, within polynomial-time and sequential processing, NP-Complete Problems into a problem of deciding feasibility of a given system S of linear equations with constants and coefficients of binary-variables that are 0, 1, or -1. S is…
Pencil puzzles are puzzles that can be solved by writing down solutions on a paper, using only logical reasoning. In this paper, we utilize the "T-metacell" framework developed by Tang and the MIT Hardness Group to prove the NP-completeness…
Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of applications of deep neural networks towards solving tasks that require superior cognitive abilities, e.g., playing Go, generating art, ChatGPT, etc. Such a dramatic progress raises the…
We outline a new tool that can promote coherence within and across higher education mathematics courses by focusing on problem-solving: the Mathematical Problem-Solving Pipeline or MPSP. The MPSP can be used for teaching mathematics and…
The fixed template Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problem (PCSP) is a recently proposed significant generalization of the fixed template CSP, which includes approximation variants of satisfiability and graph coloring problems. All the…
The satisfiability problem for multilevel syllogistic extended with the Cartesian product operator (MLSC) is a long-standing open problem in computable set theory. For long, it was not excluded that such a problem were undecidable, due to…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…