Related papers: Peg Jumping for Fun and Profit
Given integer $n$ and $k$ such that $0 < k \leq n$ and $n$ piles of stones, two player alternate turns. By one move it is allowed to choose any $k$ piles and remove exactly one stone from each. The player who has to move but cannot is the…
Given a configuration of indistinguishable pebbles on the vertices of a graph, a pebbling move consists of removing two pebbles from one vertex and placing one pebble on an adjacent vertex. The pebbling number of a graph is the least…
The picture-hanging puzzle, popularized by Demaine et al. (2014), asks for a way to wrap a wire around $n$ nails such that the picture hangs as long as fewer than $k$ nails are removed, but falls as soon as any $k$ are removed. Solutions…
Let $G=(V,E)$ be a simple graph. A function $\phi:V\rightarrow \mathbb{N}\cup \{0\}$ is called a configuration of pebbles on the vertices of $G$ and the quantity $\sum_{u\in V}\phi(u)$ is called the size of $\phi$ which is just the total…
We present a decoupled algorithm for motion planning for a collection of unit-balls moving among polyhedral obstacles in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for any $d \ge 2$. We assume that the robots have revolving areas in the vicinity of their start and…
We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n by n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles…
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…
We consider "Containment": a variation of the graph pursuit game of Cops and Robber in which cops move from edge to adjacent edge, the robber moves from vertex to adjacent vertex (but cannot move along an edge occupied by a cop), and the…
Consider a randomly shuffled deck of $2n$ cards with $n$ red cards and $n$ black cards. We study the average number of moves it takes to go from a randomly shuffled deck to a deck that alternates in color by performing the following move:…
In combinatorial reconfiguration, the reconfiguration problems on a vertex subset (e.g., an independent set) are well investigated. In these problems, some tokens are placed on a subset of vertices of the graph, and there are three natural…
The Cops and Robber game is played on undirected finite graphs. A number of cops and one robber are positioned on vertices and take turns in sliding along edges. The cops win if they can catch the robber. The minimum number of cops needed…
This paper presents a study of restricted Nim with a pass. In the restricted Nim considered in this study, two players take turns and remove stones from the piles. In each turn, when the number of stones is m, each player is allowed to…
Graph pebbling is a game played on graphs with pebbles on their vertices. A pebbling move removes two pebbles from one vertex and places one pebble on an adjacent vertex. A configuration $C$ is a supply of pebbles at various vertices of a…
We illustrate how to invite and excite students about research by exploring higher-dimensional generalizations of the classical egg drop problem, in which the goal is to locate a critical breaking point using the fewest number of trials.…
Suppose that pebbles are distributed on the vertices of a graph G. A pebbling step along an edge uv removes two pebbles from u and places one pebble on v. We introduce two new graph parameters: stack(G): the least integer t such that every…
The objective here is to find the maximum polygon, in area, which can be enclosed in a given triangle, for the polygons: parallelograms, rectangles and squares. It will initially be assumed that the choices are inscribed polygons, that is…
This paper extends the work started in 2002 by Demaine, Demaine and Verill (DDV) on coin-moving puzzles. These puzzles have a long history in the recreational literature, but were first systematically analyzed by DDV, who gave a full…
Site swap is a mathematical notation used by jugglers to communicate, create and study complex juggling patterns. Determining the number of possible site swap juggling patterns with respect to certain limiting parameters such as number of…
Let R be a two-dimensional regular local ring having an algebraically closed residue field and let a be a complete ideal of finite colength in R. In this article we investigate the jumping numbers of a by means of the dual graph of the…
Distributions of pebbles to the vertices of a graph are said to be solvable when a pebble may be moved to any specified vertex using a sequence of admissible pebbling rules. The optimal pebbling number is the least number of pebbles needed…