相关论文: Hardness of Mastermind

Consider a variant of the Mastermind game in which queries are $\ell_p$ distances, rather than the usual Hamming distance. That is, a codemaker chooses a hidden vector $\mathbf{y}\in\{-k,-k+1,\dots,k-1,k\}^n$ and answers to queries of the…

We establish some general schemes relating the computational complexity of a video game to the presence of certain common elements or mechanics, such as destroyable paths, collectible items, doors opened by keys or activated by buttons or…

What makes a computational problem easy (e.g., in P, that is, solvable in polynomial time) or hard (e.g., NP-hard)? This fundamental question now has a satisfactory answer for a quite broad class of computational problems, so called…

Positional games were introduced by Hales and Jewett in 1963, and their study became more popular after Erdos and Selfridge's first result on their connection to Ramsey theory and hypergraph coloring in 1973. Several conventions of these…

Existing reasoning datasets saturate and fail to test abstract, multi-step problems, especially pathfinding and complex rule constraint satisfaction. We introduce SPaRC (Spatial Pathfinding Reasoning Challenge), a dataset of 1,000 2D grid…

We consider the computational complexity of Hearthstone which is a popular online CCG (collectible card game). We reduce a PSPACE-complete problem, the partition game, to perfect information Hearthstone in which there is no hidden…

In the spirit of "multi-culturalism", we use four kinds of computations: simulation, numeric, symbolic, and "conceptual" to explore some "games of pure chance" inspired by children board games like "Snakes and Ladders" (aka as "Chutes and…

We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…

Repeated games are difficult to analyze, especially when agents play mixed strategies. We study one-memory strategies in iterated prisoner's dilemma, then generalize the result to k-memory strategies in repeated games. Our result shows that…

We study the algorithmic complexity of Maker-Breaker games played on the edge sets of general graphs. We mainly consider the perfect matching game and the $H$-game. Maker wins if she claims the edges of a perfect matching in the first, and…

Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…

Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a secret word $w$ that has been chosen from a dictionary $D$. In order to discover $w$, the player can make at most $\ell$ guesses, which must also be words from…

For an NP intersect coNP function g of the Nisan-Wigderson type and a string b outside its range we consider a two player game on a common input a to the function. One player, a computationally limited Student, tries to find a bit of g(a)…

We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…

Minesweeper is an interesting single player game based on logic, memory and guessing. Solving Minesweeper has been shown to be an NP-hard task. Deterministic solvers are the best known approach for solving Minesweeper. This project proposes…

We consider the following game that has been used as a way of testing claims of extrasensory perception (ESP). One is given a deck of $mn$ cards comprised of $n$ distinct types each of which appears exactly $m$ times: this deck is shuffled…

Many puzzle video games, like Sokoban, involve moving some agent in a maze. The reachable locations are usually apparent for a human player, and the difficulty of the game is mainly related to performing actions on objects, such as pushing…

The physics-based simulation game Angry Birds has been heavily researched by the AI community over the past five years, and has been the subject of a popular AI competition that is currently held annually as part of a leading AI conference.…

The joint optimization of the integer matrix $\mathbf{A}$ and the power scaling matrix $\mathbf{D}$ is central to achieving the capacity-approaching performance of Integer-Forcing (IF) precoding. This problem, however, is known to be…

Weak-memory models are standard formal specifications of concurrency across hardware, programming languages, and distributed systems. A fundamental computational problem is consistency testing: is the observed execution of a concurrent…