3,179 research outputs found
Positional Games and QBF: The Corrective Encoding
Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising
Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games
into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBF) such that a game instance admits a
winning strategy for first player if and only if the corresponding formula is
true. Our approach improves over previous QBF encodings of games in multiple
ways. First, it is generic and lets us encode other positional games, such as
Hex. Second, structural properties of positional games together with a careful
treatment of illegal moves let us generate more compact instances that can be
solved faster by state-of-the-art QBF solvers. We establish the latter fact
through extensive experiments. Finally, the compactness of our new encoding
makes it feasible to translate realistic game problems. We identify a few such
problems of historical significance and put them forward to the QBF community
as milestones of increasing difficulty.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 23rd International Conference on
Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT2020
Near-optimal labeling schemes for nearest common ancestors
We consider NCA labeling schemes: given a rooted tree , label the nodes of
with binary strings such that, given the labels of any two nodes, one can
determine, by looking only at the labels, the label of their nearest common
ancestor.
For trees with nodes we present upper and lower bounds establishing that
labels of size , are both sufficient and
necessary. (All logarithms in this paper are in base 2.)
Alstrup, Bille, and Rauhe (SIDMA'05) showed that ancestor and NCA labeling
schemes have labels of size . Our lower bound
increases this to for NCA labeling schemes. Since
Fraigniaud and Korman (STOC'10) established that labels in ancestor labeling
schemes have size , our new lower bound separates
ancestor and NCA labeling schemes. Our upper bound improves the
upper bound by Alstrup, Gavoille, Kaplan and Rauhe (TOCS'04), and our
theoretical result even outperforms some recent experimental studies by Fischer
(ESA'09) where variants of the same NCA labeling scheme are shown to all have
labels of size approximately
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