Candy Crush is NP-hard

Trainyard is NP-hard

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 features are somehow related to their computational complexity [5]. Indeed, many puzzle games – such as Mah-Jongg, Sokoban, Candy Crush, and 2048, to name a few – a...

Are you addicted to Candy Crush Saga? An exploratory study linking psychological factors to mobile social game addiction

Parallelizing Assignment Problem with DNA Strands

Background:Many problems of combinatorial optimization, which are solvable only in exponential time, are known to be Non-Deterministic Polynomial hard (NP-hard). With the advent of parallel machines, new opportunities have been emerged to develop the effective solutions for NP-hard problems. However, solving these problems in polynomial time needs massive parallel machines and ...

Moisture and shelf life in sugar confections.

From hardening of marshmallow to graining of hard candies, moisture plays a critical role in determining the quality and shelf life of sugar-based confections. Water is important during the manufacturing of confections, is an important factor in governing texture, and is often the limiting parameter during storage that controls shelf life. Thus, an understanding of water relations in confection...

Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem by an Efficient Hybrid Metaheuristic Algorithm

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is the problem of finding the shortest tour through all the nodes that a salesman has to visit. The TSP is probably the most famous and extensively studied problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. Because this problem is an NP-hard problem, practical large-scale instances cannot be solved by exact algorithms within acceptable computational times. ...