相关论文: Hardness of Mastermind
This paper presents an optimal strategy for solving the 4 peg-7 color Mastermind MM(4,7) in the expected case (4.676) along with optimal strategies or upper bounds for other values. The program developed is using a depth-first branch and…
In the Generalized Mastermind problem, there is an unknown subset $H$ of the hypercube $\{0,1\}^d$ containing $n$ points. The goal is to learn $H$ by making a few queries to an oracle, which, given a point $q$ in $\{0,1\}^d$, returns the…
Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this…
We study three problems related to the computational complexity of the popular game Minesweeper. The first is consistency: given a set of clues, is there any arrangement of mines that satisfies it? This problem has been known to be…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to remarkable performance across a wide range of language understanding and mathematical tasks. As a result, increasing attention has been given to assessing the true reasoning…
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…
The game of Hangman is a classical asymmetric two player game in which one player, the setter, chooses a secret word from a language, that the other player, the guesser, tries to discover through single letter matching queries, answered by…
his paper presents two novel approaches to solving the classic board game mastermind, including a variant of simulated annealing (SA) and a technique we term maximum expected reduction in consistency (MERC). In addition, we compare search…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
In the permutation Mastermind game, the goal is to uncover a secret permutation $\sigma^\star \colon [n] \to [n]$ by making a series of guesses $\pi_1, \ldots, \pi_T$ which must also be permutations of $[n]$, and receiving as feedback after…
Peg solitaire is an old puzzle with a 300 year history. We consider two ways a computer can be utilized to find interesting peg solitaire puzzles. It is common for a peg solitaire puzzle to begin from a symmetric board position, we have…
We analyze the computational complexity of the many types of pencil-and-paper-style puzzles featured in the 2016 puzzle video game The Witness. In all puzzles, the goal is to draw a simple path in a rectangular grid graph from a start…
In games with imperfect recall, players may forget the sequence of decisions they made in the past. When players also forget whether they have already encountered their current decision point, they are said to be absent-minded. Solving…
We analyze the computational complexity of Tetris clearing (determining whether the player can clear an initial board using a given sequence of pieces) and survival (determining whether the player can avoid losing before placing all the…
In imperfect-information games, subgame solving is significantly more challenging than in perfect-information games, but in the last few years, such techniques have been developed. They were the key ingredient to the milestone of superhuman…
Minesweeper is a popular spatial-based decision-making game that works with incomplete information. As an exemplary NP-complete problem, it is a major area of research employing various artificial intelligence paradigms. The present work…
Lemmings is a computer puzzle game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in 1991, in which the player has to guide a tribe of lemming creatures to safety through a hazardous landscape, by assigning them specific skills that…
In the Maker-Breaker vertex colouring game, first publicised by Gardner in 1981, Maker and Breaker alternately colour vertices of a graph using a fixed palette, maintaining a proper colouring at all times. Maker aims to colour the whole…
The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and…
Edge-matching problems, also called edge matching puzzles, are abstractions of placement problems with neighborhood conditions. Pieces with colored edges have to be placed on a board such that adjacent edges have the same color. The problem…