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International Conference on Fun with Algorithms

FUN 2014: Fun with Algorithms pp 137–146Cite as

Playing Dominoes Is Hard, Except by Yourself

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8496))

Abstract

Dominoes is a popular and well-known game possibly dating back three millennia. Players are given a set of domino tiles, each with two labeled square faces, and take turns connecting them into a growing chain of dominoes by matching identical faces. We show that single-player dominoes is in P, while multiplayer dominoes is hard: when players cooperate, the game is NP-complete, and when players compete, the game is PSPACE-complete. In addition, we show that these hardness results easily extend to games involving team play.

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References

  1. Stormdark, I.P., Media: Domino history (2010), http://www.domino-play.com/History.htm

  2. Demaine, E.D., Demaine, M.L., Harvey, N.J., Uehara, R., Uno, T., Uno, Y.: Uno is hard, even for a single player. Theoretical Computer Science 521, 51–61 (2014)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 32 Vassar St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Erik D. Demaine, Fermi Ma & Erik Waingarten

Authors
  1. Erik D. Demaine
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  2. Fermi Ma
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  3. Erik Waingarten
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Città Universitaria, Università degli Studi di Catania, Viale A. Doria, 6, 95125, Catania, Italy

    Alfredo Ferro

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Largo B. Pontecorvo 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Fabrizio Luccio

  3. Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, ETH Zürich, Universitätsstrasse 6, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Peter Widmayer

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Cite this paper

Demaine, E.D., Ma, F., Waingarten, E. (2014). Playing Dominoes Is Hard, Except by Yourself. In: Ferro, A., Luccio, F., Widmayer, P. (eds) Fun with Algorithms. FUN 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07890-8_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07890-8_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07889-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07890-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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