Related papers: Frustration solitaire
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
Integration is affected by the curse of dimensionality and quickly becomes intractable as the dimensionality of the problem grows. We propose a randomized algorithm that, with high probability, gives a constant-factor approximation of a…
We prove a complexity dichotomy for a class of counting problems expressible as bipartite 3-regular Holant problems. For every problem of the form $\operatorname{Holant}\left(f\mid =_3 \right)$, where $f$ is any integer-valued ternary…
The paper focuses on a new class of combinatorial problems which consists in restructuring of solutions (as sets/structures) in combinatorial optimization. Two main features of the restructuring process are examined: (i) a cost of the…
Normally a chess problem must have a unique solution, and is deemed unsound even if there are alternatives that differ only in the order in which the same moves are played. In an enumerative chess problem, the set of moves in the solution…
We identify and study a simple combinatorial problem that is derived from submodularity issues encountered in the theory of tangles of graphs and abstract separation systems.
We introduce a sorting machine consisting of $k+1$ stacks in series: the first $k$ stacks can only contain elements in decreasing order from top to bottom, while the last one has the opposite restriction. This device generalizes \cite{SM},…
In this paper we study partitions whose successive ranks belong to a given set. We enumerate such partitions while keeping track of the number of parts, the largest part, the side of the Durfee square, and the height of the Durfee…
This paper explores the Prouhet-Tarry-Escott problem (PTE), the Generalized PTE problem (GPTE), and the Fermat form of Generalized PTE problem (FPTE). The GPTE problem extends the PTE problem by allowing different sets of exponents, while…
The aim of this thesis is to determine classes of NP relations for which random generation and approximate counting problems admit an efficient solution. Since efficient rank implies efficient random generation, we first investigate some…
We consider a mathematical model for the classical Sudoku puzzle, which we call the primal problem and introduce a corresponding dual problem. Both problems are constraint satisfaction models and a duality relation between them is proved.…
We study a variation of the game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem or game of googol) under an additional assumption that the ranks of interview candidates are restricted using permutation pattern-avoidance. We develop…
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:…
We consider the problem of reconstructing a rank-one matrix from a revealed subset of its entries when some of the revealed entries are corrupted with perturbations that are unknown and can be arbitrarily large. It is not known which…
We introduce and study the random "locked" constraint satisfaction problems. When increasing the density of constraints, they display a broad "clustered" phase in which the space of solutions is divided into many isolated points. While the…
This article is dedicated to the following class of problems. Start with an $N\times N$ Hermitian matrix randomly picked from a matrix ensemble - the reference matrix. Applying a rank-$t$ perturbation to it, with $t$ taking the values $1\le…
Heuristic algorithms have shown a good ability to solve a variety of optimization problems. Stockpile blending problem as an important component of the mine scheduling problem is an optimization problem with continuous search space…
We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…
A single-elimination (SE) tournament is a popular way to select a winner in both sports competitions and in elections. A natural and well-studied question is the tournament fixing problem (TFP): given the set of all pairwise match outcomes,…
By disintegration of transport plans it is introduced the notion of transport class. This allows to consider the Monge problem as a particular case of the Kantorovich transport problem, once a transport class is fixed. The transport problem…