Abstract
The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and establish interesting connections with other classical computational problems.
Specifically, we first show that a natural generalization of the problem of finding a single Set, parameterized by the size of the sought Set is W-hard; our reduction applies also to a natural parameterization of Perfect Multi-Dimensional Matching, a result which may be of independent interest. Second, we observe that a version of the game where one seeks to find the largest possible number of disjoint Sets from a given set of cards is a special case of 3-Set Packing; we establish that this restriction remains NP-complete. Similarly, the version where one seeks to find the smallest number of disjoint Sets that overlap all possible Sets is shown to be NP-complete, through a close connection to the Independent Edge Dominating Set problem. Finally, we study a 2- player version of the game, for which we show a close connection to Arc Kayles, as well as fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by the number of rounds played.
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Lampis, M., Mitsou, V. (2014). The Computational Complexity of the Game of Set and Its Theoretical Applications. In: Pardo, A., Viola, A. (eds) LATIN 2014: Theoretical Informatics. LATIN 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8392. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54423-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54423-1_3
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