One of the most remarkable human abilities is that of learning a language. Not only do people learn to speak, but more recently they have learned to read — to associate the spoken sounds with written symbols. It is an extraordinary biological achievement, particularly as written language is relatively new. In a new review published (online) within a special issue of the Philosophical Transactio...

Bees have many natural enemies. It's not just bears that take a shine to the honey and/or the immature insects. There are also yeasts and parasitic insects that threaten to rob the colonies of the rewards of their hard labour. Researchers recently found that one parasite, the small hive beetle, even uses the bee's alarm pheromone as a signpost to congregate on stressed hives. With this and the ...

Sudoku is a logic-based combinatorial puzzle game which is popular among people of different ages. Due to this popularity, computer softwares are being developed to generate and solve Sudoku puzzles with different levels of difficulty. Several methods and algorithms have been proposed and used in different softwares to efficiently solve Sudoku puzzles. Various search methods such as stochastic ...

Paper discuss some issues related to model checking: (1) early model checking teaching via games, (2) utility of model checking and games for solving puzzles, (3) importance of games for validation of model checkers. Basic ideas are illustrated by a model checking based solution for a complicated puzzle how to identify a unique false coin among given ones balancing them limited times.

Sudoku puzzles are an excellent testbed for evolutionary algorithms. The puzzles are accessible enough to be enjoyed by people. However the more complex puzzles require thousands of iterations before a solution is found by an evolutionary algorithm. If we were attempting to compare evolutionary algorithms we could count their iterations to solution as a indicator of relative efficiency. However...

We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing n square tiles into a 1 × n array such that adjacent tiles are compatible—either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as in jigsaw puzzles. Beyond basic NP-hardness, we prove that it is NPhard even to approximately maximize the number of placed tiles (allowing blanks), while satisfying th...

While there are many potential benefits of user-generated content for serious games, the variability of that content’s quality poses a serious problem. In our game, BOTS, players can create puzzles which are shared with other users. However, other players often find these puzzles irrelevant, unplayable, too difficult, or simply boring. To avoid frustrating players with low-quality puzzles, we h...

Students of the second professional MBBS course of the Indian medical curriculum (II MBBS) perceive pharmacology as a 'Volatile Subject' because they often find it difficult to remember and recall drug names. We evaluated the usefulness of crossword puzzles as a self-learning tool to help pharmacology students to remember drug names. We also measured the students' satisfaction with this learnin...

Link puzzles involve finding paths or a cycle in a grid that satisfy given local and global properties. This paper proposes algorithms that enumerate solutions and instances of two link puzzles, Slitherlink and Numberlink, by zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZDDs). A ZDD is a compact data structure for a family of sets provided with a rich family of set operations, by which, for exampl...