相关论文: PushPush is NP-hard in 2D

Despite its long history, the classical game of peg solitaire continues to attract the attention of the scientific community. In this paper, we consider two problems with an algorithmic flavour which are related with this game, namely…

This paper investigates why and when the edge-based districting problem becomes computationally intractable. The overall problem is represented as an exact mathematical programming formulation consisting of an objective function and several…

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 introduce and investigate the computational complexity of a novel physical problem known as the Pinball Wizard problem. It involves an idealized pinball moving through a maze composed of one-way gates (outswing doors), plane walls,…

Block Sorting is a well studied problem, motivated by its applications in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Computational Biology. Block Sorting has been shown to be NP-Hard, and two separate polynomial time 2-approximation…

Recursed is a 2D puzzle platform video game featuring treasure chests that, when jumped into, instantiate a room that can later be exited (similar to function calls), optionally generating a jar that returns back to that room (similar to…

We investigate the complexity of bounding the uncertainty of graphical games, and we provide new insight into the intrinsic difficulty of computing Nash equilibria. In particular, we show that, if one adds very simple and natural additional…

This study examines the computational complexity of the decision problem modeled on the smartphone game Bus Out. The objective of the game is to load all the passengers in a queue onto appropriate buses using a limited number of bus parking…

We analyse the computational complexity of finding Nash equilibria in simple stochastic multiplayer games. We show that restricting the search space to equilibria whose payoffs fall into a certain interval may lead to undecidability. In…

We consider two-player turn-based games with zero-reachability and zero-safety objectives generated by extended vector addition systems with states. Although the problem of deciding the winner in such games is undecidable in general, we…

We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…

We show that the Minesweeper game is PP-hard, when the object is to locate all mines with the highest probability. When the probability of locating all mines may be infinitesimal, the Minesweeper game is even PSPACE-complete. In our…

We show that \emph{Sorting by Strip Swaps} (SbSS) is NP-hard by a polynomial reduction of \emph{Block Sorting}. The key idea is a local gadget, a \emph{cage}, that replaces every decreasing adjacency $(a_i,a_{i+1})$ by a guarded triple…

In the Nikoli pencil-and-paper game Double Choco, a puzzle consists of an m $\times$ n grid of cells of white or gray color, separated by dotted lines where each cell possibly contains an integer. The goal is to partition the grid into…

We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…

We study countably infinite stochastic 2-player games with reachability objectives. Our results provide a complete picture of the memory requirements of $\varepsilon$-optimal (resp. optimal) strategies. These results depend on the size of…

The reachability problem is a central decision problem for formal verification based on vector addition systems with states (VASS), which are equivalent to Petri nets and form one of the most studied and applied models of concurrency.…

We present and analyze PackIt!, a turn-based game consisting of packing rectangles on an $n \times n$ grid. PackIt! can be easily played on paper, either as a competitive two-player game or in \emph{solitaire} fashion. On the $t$-th turn, a…

Multi-stack pushdown systems are a well-studied model of concurrent computation using threads with first-order procedure calls. While, in general, reachability is undecidable, there are numerous restrictions on stack behaviour that lead to…

Visibly pushdown transducers form a subclass of pushdown transducers that (strictly) extends finite state transducers with a stack. Like visibly pushdown automata, the input symbols determine the stack operations. In this paper, we prove…