Related papers: Peg Jumping for Fun and Profit
The pancake puzzle is a classic optimization problem that has become a standard benchmark for heuristic search algorithms. In this paper, we provide full proofs regarding the local search topology of the gap heuristic for the pancake…
A jump is a pair of consecutive elements in an extension of a poset which are incomparable in the original poset. The arboreal jump number is an NP-hard problem that aims to find an arboreal extension of a given poset with minimum number of…
Consider a configuration of pebbles on the vertices of a connected graph. A pebbling move is to remove two pebbles from a vertex and to place one pebble at the neighbouring vertex of the vertex from which the pebbles are removed. For a…
We introduce the following variant of the Gale-Berlekamp switching game. Let $P$ be a set of n noncollinear points in the plane, each of them having weight $+1$ or $-1$. At each step, we pick a line $\ell$ passing through at least two…
In this paper we study a single player game consisting of $n$ black checkers and $m$ white checkers, called shifting the checkers. We have proved that the minimum number of steps needed to play the game for general $n$ and $m$ is $nm + n +…
A pebbling move on a graph removes two pebbles at a vertex and adds one pebble at an adjacent vertex. Rubbling is a version of pebbling where an additional move is allowed. In this new move one pebble is removed at vertices v and w adjacent…
We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…
We prove the exact formulae for the expected number of moves to solve several variants of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle with 3 pegs and n disks, when each move is chosen uniformly randomly from the set of all valid moves. We further present an…
The move-minimizing puzzles presented here are certain types of one-player combinatorial games that are shown to have explicit solutions whenever they can be encoded in a certain way as diamond-colored modular or distributive lattices. Our…
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…
This paper uses robots to assemble pegs into holes on surfaces with different colors and textures. It especially targets at the problem of peg-in-hole assembly with initial position uncertainty. Two in-hand cameras and a force-torque sensor…
A configuration of a graph is an assignment of one of two states, on or off, to each vertex of it. A regular move at a vertex changes the states of the neighbors of that vertex. A valid move is a regular move at an on vertex. The following…
A pebbling move on a graph G consists of the removal of two pebbles from one vertex and the placement of one pebble on an adjacent vertex. Rubbling is a version of pebbling where an additional move is allowed, which is also called the…
We study the Torus Puzzle, a solitaire game in which the elements of an input $m \times n$ matrix need to be rearranged into a target configuration via a sequence of unit rotations (i.e., circular shifts) of rows and/or columns. Amano et…
Consider the restricted Hanoi graphs which correspond to the variants of the famous Tower of Hanoi problem with multiple pegs where moves of the discs are restricted throughout the arcs of a movement digraph whose vertices represent the…
Pebbling on graphs is a two-player game which involves repeatedly moving a pebble from one vertex to another by removing another pebble from the first vertex. The pebbling number $\pi(G)$ is the least number of pebbles required so that,…
We are going to show that some variants of a puzzle called Pull in which the boxes have handles (i.e. we can only pull the boxes in certain directions) are NP-hard
We consider the complexity of problems related to the combinatorial game Free-Flood-It, in which players aim to make a coloured graph monochromatic with the minimum possible number of flooding operations. Although computing the minimum…
The $k$-majority game is played with $n$ numbered balls, each coloured with one of two colours. It is given that there are at least $k$ balls of the majority colour, where $k$ is a fixed integer greater than $n/2$. On each turn the player…
We prove that two pushing-blocks puzzles are intractable in 2D. One of our constructions improves an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99] for a puzzle inspired by the game PushPush. The second construction answers a…