相关论文: Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate

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 Taxman game has proven to be hard to solve optimally, so efforts have been made to find heuristic strategies that do well in practice. We present results on the NP-hardness of a variant of the game via an equivalence to a particular…

In the problem called single resource constraint scheduling, we are given $m$ identical machines and a set of jobs, each needing one machine to be processed as well as a share of a limited renewable resource $R$. A schedule of these jobs is…

We consider approximating the minmax value of a multi-player game in strategic form. Tightening recent bounds by Borgs et al., we observe that approximating the value with a precision of epsilon log n digits (for any constant epsilon>0 is…

We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…

The vertex cover problem is one of the most important and intensively studied combinatorial optimization problems. Khot and Regev (2003) proved that the problem is NP-hard to approximate within a factor $2 - \epsilon$, assuming the Unique…

The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…

We study the problems of covering or partitioning a polygon $P$ (possibly with holes) using a minimum number of small pieces, where a small piece is a connected sub-polygon contained in an axis-aligned unit square. For covering, we seek to…

We introduce an impartial combinatorial game on Steiner triple systems called Nofil. Players move alternately, choosing points of the triple system. If a player is forced to fill a block on their turn, they lose. We explore the play of…

We study the complexity of solving two-player infinite duration games played on a fixed finite graph, where the control of a node is not predetermined but rather assigned randomly. In classic random-turn games, control of each node is…

We prove that a sufficiently strong parallel repetition theorem for a special case of multiplayer (multiprover) games implies super-linear lower bounds for multi-tape Turing machines with advice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the…

In the usual trace reconstruction problem, the goal is to exactly reconstruct an unknown string of length $n$ after it passes through a deletion channel many times independently, producing a set of traces (i.e., random subsequences of the…

Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…

We develop a quasi-polynomial time Las Vegas algorithm for approximating Nash equilibria in polymatrix games over trees, under a mild renormalizing assumption. Our result, in particular, leads to an expected polynomial-time algorithm for…

We study a fair division problem with indivisible items, namely the computation of maximin share allocations. Given a set of $n$ players, the maximin share of a single player is the best she can guarantee to herself, if she would partition…

We consider a sub-class of bi-matrix games which we refer to as two-person (hereafter referred to as two-player) additively-separable sum (TPASS) games, where the sum of the pay-offs of the two players is additively separable. The row…

This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…

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…

Self-play is a technique for machine learning in multi-agent systems where a learning algorithm learns by interacting with copies of itself. Self-play is useful for generating large quantities of data for learning, but has the drawback that…

Consider the following one-player game played on an initially empty graph with $n$ vertices. At each stage a randomly selected new edge is added and the player must immediately color the edge with one of $r$ available colors. Her objective…