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Documents authored by Giacchini, Mirko

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2026.2
Man, These New York Times Games Are Hard! A Computational Perspective

Authors: Alessandro Giovanni Alberti, Flavio Chierichetti, Mirko Giacchini, Daniele Muscillo, Alessandro Panconesi, and Erasmo Tani

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 366, 13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026)

Abstract
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper’s readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times games and consider four of them not previously studied: Letter Boxed, Pips, Strands and Tiles. We show that these games can be just as hard as they are fun. In particular, we characterize the hardness of several variants of computational problems related to these popular puzzle games. For Letter Boxed, we show that deciding whether an instance is solvable is in general NP-Complete, while in some parameter settings it can be done in polynomial time. Similarly, for Pips we prove that deciding whether a puzzle has a solution is NP-Complete even in some restricted classes of instances. We then show that one natural computational problem arising from Strands is NP-Complete in most parameter settings. Finally, we demonstrate that deciding whether a Tiles puzzle is solvable with a single, uninterrupted combo requires polynomial time.
Cite as

Alessandro Giovanni Alberti, Flavio Chierichetti, Mirko Giacchini, Daniele Muscillo, Alessandro Panconesi, and Erasmo Tani. Man, These New York Times Games Are Hard! A Computational Perspective. In 13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 366, pp. 2:1-2:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{alberti_et_al:LIPIcs.FUN.2026.2,
  author =	{Alberti, Alessandro Giovanni and Chierichetti, Flavio and Giacchini, Mirko and Muscillo, Daniele and Panconesi, Alessandro and Tani, Erasmo},
  title =	{{Man, These New York Times Games Are Hard! A Computational Perspective}},
  booktitle =	{13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026)},
  pages =	{2:1--2:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-417-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{366},
  editor =	{Iacono, John},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2026.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-257219},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2026.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: NP-Hardness, Puzzles, Games, New York Times, Pips, Letter Boxed, Strands, Tiles}
}
Document
Track A: Algorithms, Complexity and Games
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.58
A New Impossibility Result for Online Bipartite Matching Problems

Authors: Flavio Chierichetti, Mirko Giacchini, Alessandro Panconesi, and Andrea Vattani

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 334, 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)

Abstract
Online Bipartite Matching with random user arrival is a fundamental problem in the online advertisement ecosystem. Over the last 30 years, many algorithms and impossibility results have been developed for this problem. In particular, the latest impossibility result was established by Manshadi, Oveis Gharan and Saberi [Manshadi et al., 2011] in 2011. Since then, several algorithms have been published in an effort to narrow the gap between the upper and the lower bounds on the competitive ratio. In this paper we show that no algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio better than 1- e/(e^e) = 0.82062…, improving upon the 0.823 upper bound presented in [Manshadi et al., 2011]. Our construction is simple to state, accompanied by a fully analytic proof, and yields a competitive ratio bound intriguingly similar to 1 - 1/e, the optimal competitive ratio for the fully adversarial Online Bipartite Matching problem. Although the tightness of our upper bound remains an open question, we show that our construction is extremal in a natural class of instances.
Cite as

Flavio Chierichetti, Mirko Giacchini, Alessandro Panconesi, and Andrea Vattani. A New Impossibility Result for Online Bipartite Matching Problems. In 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 334, pp. 58:1-58:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{chierichetti_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.58,
  author =	{Chierichetti, Flavio and Giacchini, Mirko and Panconesi, Alessandro and Vattani, Andrea},
  title =	{{A New Impossibility Result for Online Bipartite Matching Problems}},
  booktitle =	{52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)},
  pages =	{58:1--58:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-372-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{334},
  editor =	{Censor-Hillel, Keren and Grandoni, Fabrizio and Ouaknine, Jo\"{e}l and Puppis, Gabriele},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.58},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-234354},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.58},
  annote =	{Keywords: Bipartite Matching, Random Graphs, Competitive Ratio}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2024.26
Coordinating "7 Billion Humans" Is Hard

Authors: Alessandro Panconesi, Pietro Maria Posta, and Mirko Giacchini

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 291, 12th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2024)

Abstract
In the video game "7 Billion Humans", the player is requested to direct a group of workers to various destinations by writing a program that is executed simultaneously on each worker. While the game is quite rich and, indeed, it is considered one of the best games for beginners to learn the basics of programming, we show that even extremely simple versions are already NP-Hard or PSPACE-Hard.
Cite as

Alessandro Panconesi, Pietro Maria Posta, and Mirko Giacchini. Coordinating "7 Billion Humans" Is Hard. In 12th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 291, pp. 26:1-26:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{panconesi_et_al:LIPIcs.FUN.2024.26,
  author =	{Panconesi, Alessandro and Posta, Pietro Maria and Giacchini, Mirko},
  title =	{{Coordinating "7 Billion Humans" Is Hard}},
  booktitle =	{12th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2024)},
  pages =	{26:1--26:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-314-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{291},
  editor =	{Broder, Andrei Z. and Tamir, Tami},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2024.26},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-199342},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2024.26},
  annote =	{Keywords: video games, computational complexity, NP, PSPACE}
}
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