21 research outputs found
Who witnesses The Witness? Finding witnesses in The Witness is hard and sometimes impossible
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 vertex to a destination vertex. The different puzzle
types place different constraints on the path: preventing some edges from being
visited (broken edges); forcing some edges or vertices to be visited
(hexagons); forcing some cells to have certain numbers of incident path edges
(triangles); or forcing the regions formed by the path to be partially
monochromatic (squares), have exactly two special cells (stars), or be singly
covered by given shapes (polyominoes) and/or negatively counting shapes
(antipolyominoes). We show that any one of these clue types (except the first)
is enough to make path finding NP-complete ("witnesses exist but are hard to
find"), even for rectangular boards. Furthermore, we show that a final clue
type (antibody), which necessarily "cancels" the effect of another clue in the
same region, makes path finding -complete ("witnesses do not exist"),
even with a single antibody (combined with many anti/polyominoes), and the
problem gets no harder with many antibodies. On the positive side, we give a
polynomial-time algorithm for monomino clues, by reducing to hexagon clues on
the boundary of the puzzle, even in the presence of broken edges, and solving
"subset Hamiltonian path" for terminals on the boundary of an embedded planar
graph in polynomial time.Comment: 72 pages, 59 figures. Revised proof of Lemma 3.5. A short version of
this paper appeared at the 9th International Conference on Fun with
Algorithms (FUN 2018
Enumeration of Matchings: Problems and Progress
This document is built around a list of thirty-two problems in enumeration of
matchings, the first twenty of which were presented in a lecture at MSRI in the
fall of 1996. I begin with a capsule history of the topic of enumeration of
matchings. The twenty original problems, with commentary, comprise the bulk of
the article. I give an account of the progress that has been made on these
problems as of this writing, and include pointers to both the printed and
on-line literature; roughly half of the original twenty problems were solved by
participants in the MSRI Workshop on Combinatorics, their students, and others,
between 1996 and 1999. The article concludes with a dozen new open problems.
(Note: This article supersedes math.CO/9801060 and math.CO/9801061.)Comment: 1+37 pages; to appear in "New Perspectives in Geometric
Combinatorics" (ed. by Billera, Bjorner, Green, Simeon, and Stanley),
Mathematical Science Research Institute publication #37, Cambridge University
Press, 199
Domino tiling, gene recognition and mice
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-192).by Lior Samuel Pachter.Ph.D
1-D broadside-radiating leaky-wave antenna based on a numerically synthesized impedance surface
A newly-developed deterministic numerical technique for the automated design of metasurface antennas is applied here for the first time to the design of a 1-D printed Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA) for broadside radiation. The surface impedance synthesis process does not require any a priori knowledge on the impedance pattern, and starts from a mask constraint on the desired far-field and practical bounds on the unit cell impedance values. The designed reactance surface for broadside radiation exhibits a non conventional patterning; this highlights the merit of using an automated design process for a design well known to be challenging for analytical methods. The antenna is physically implemented with an array of metal strips with varying gap widths and simulation results show very good agreement with the predicted performance