Related papers: PushPush is NP-hard in 3D
In many applications, we want to influence the decisions of independent agents by designing incentives for their actions. We revisit a fundamental problem in this area, called GAME IMPLEMENTATION: Given a game in standard form and a set of…
We prove that deciding if a diagram of the unknot can be untangled using at most $k$ Riedemeister moves (where $k$ is part of the input) is NP-hard. We also prove that several natural questions regarding links in the $3$-sphere are NP-hard,…
We propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
Pushdown Vector Addition Systems with States (PVASS) consist of finitely many control states, a pushdown stack, and a set of counters that can be incremented and decremented, but not tested for zero. Whether the reachability problem is…
"Bubble Ball" is a game built on a 2D physics engine, where a finite set of objects can modify the motion of a bubble-like ball. The objective is to choose the set and the initial configuration of the objects, in order to get the ball to…
Swish is a card game in which players are given cards having symbols (hoops and balls), and find a valid superposition of cards, called a "swish." Dailly, Lafourcade, and Marcadet (FUN 2024) studied a generalized version of Swish and showed…
We introduce and investigate the computational complexity of a novel physical problem known as the Pinball Wizard problem. It involves an idealized pinball moving through a maze composed of one-way gates (outswing doors), plane walls,…
Higher-order pushdown systems (PDSs) generalise pushdown systems through the use of higher-order stacks, that is, a nested "stack of stacks" structure. These systems may be used to model higher-order programs and are closely related to the…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
Push-1 is one of the simplest abstract frameworks for motion planning; however, the complexity of deciding if a Push-1 problem can be solved was a several-decade-old open question. We resolve the complexity of the motion planning problem…
The reachability problem is a central decision problem for formal verification based on vector addition systems with states (VASS), which are equivalent to Petri nets and form one of the most studied and applied models of concurrency.…
Sumplete is a logic puzzle famous for being developed by ChatGPT. The puzzle consists of a rectangular grid, with each cell containing a number. The player has to cross out some numbers such that the sum of uncrossed numbers in each row and…
This paper deals with the problem of point-to-point reachability in multi-linear systems. These systems consist of a partition of the Euclidean space into a finite number of regions and a constant derivative assigned to each region in the…
We study versions of cop and robber pursuit-evasion games on the visibility graphs of polygons, and inside polygons with straight and curved sides. Each player has full information about the other player's location, players take turns, and…
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…
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show…
Adversarial multiplayer games are an important object of study in multiagent learning. In particular, polymatrix zero-sum games are a multiplayer setting where Nash equilibria are known to be efficiently computable. Towards understanding…
The intractability of any problem and the randomness of its solutions have an obvious intuitive connection. However, the challenge till now has been that there is no practical way to firmly establish if the solution to a problem is actually…
The Stable Roommates problem involves matching a set of agents into pairs based on the agents' strict ordinal preference lists. The matching must be stable, meaning that no two agents strictly prefer each other to their assigned partners. A…