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Documents authored by Tani, Erasmo

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.2025.49
Submodular Hypergraph Partitioning: Metric Relaxations and Fast Algorithms via an Improved Cut-Matching Game

Authors: Antares Chen, Lorenzo Orecchia, and Erasmo Tani

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

Abstract
Despite there being significant work on developing spectral- [Chan et al., 2018; Lau et al., 2023; Kwok et al., 2022], and metric-embedding-based [Louis and Makarychev, 2016] approximation algorithms for hypergraph conductance, little is known regarding the approximability of other hypergraph partitioning objectives. This work proposes algorithms for a general model of hypergraph partitioning that unifies both undirected and directed versions of many well-studied partitioning objectives. The first contribution of this paper introduces polymatroidal cut functions, a large class of cut functions amenable to approximation algorithms via metric embeddings and routing multicommodity flows. We demonstrate a simple O(√{log n})-approximation, where n is the number of vertices in the hypergraph, for these problems by rounding relaxations to metrics of negative-type. The second contribution of this paper generalizes the cut-matching game framework of Khandekar et al. [Khandekar et al., 2007] to tackle polymatroidal cut functions. This yields an almost-linear time O(log n)-approximation algorithm for standard versions of undirected and directed hypergraph partitioning [Kwok et al., 2022]. A technical contribution of our construction is a novel cut-matching game, which greatly relaxes the set of allowed actions by the cut player and allows for the use of approximate s-t maximum flows by the matching player. We believe this to be of independent interest.
Cite as

Antares Chen, Lorenzo Orecchia, and Erasmo Tani. Submodular Hypergraph Partitioning: Metric Relaxations and Fast Algorithms via an Improved Cut-Matching Game. In 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 334, pp. 49:1-49:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.49,
  author =	{Chen, Antares and Orecchia, Lorenzo and Tani, Erasmo},
  title =	{{Submodular Hypergraph Partitioning: Metric Relaxations and Fast Algorithms via an Improved Cut-Matching Game}},
  booktitle =	{52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)},
  pages =	{49:1--49:16},
  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.2025.49},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-234261},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.49},
  annote =	{Keywords: Hypergraph Partitioning, Cut Improvement, Cut-Matching Game}
}
Document
Track A: Algorithms, Complexity and Games
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.111
Approximation Algorithms for 𝓁_p-Shortest Path and 𝓁_p-Group Steiner Tree

Authors: Yury Makarychev, Max Ovsiankin, and Erasmo Tani

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 297, 51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2024)

Abstract
We present polylogarithmic approximation algorithms for variants of the Shortest Path, Group Steiner Tree, and Group ATSP problems with vector costs. In these problems, each edge e has a vector cost c_e ∈ ℝ_{≥0}^𝓁. For a feasible solution - a path, subtree, or tour (respectively) - we find the total vector cost of all the edges in the solution and then compute the 𝓁_p-norm of the obtained cost vector (we assume that p ≥ 1 is an integer). Our algorithms for series-parallel graphs run in polynomial time and those for arbitrary graphs run in quasi-polynomial time. To obtain our results, we introduce and use new flow-based Sum-of-Squares relaxations. We also obtain a number of hardness results.
Cite as

Yury Makarychev, Max Ovsiankin, and Erasmo Tani. Approximation Algorithms for 𝓁_p-Shortest Path and 𝓁_p-Group Steiner Tree. In 51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 297, pp. 111:1-111:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{makarychev_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.111,
  author =	{Makarychev, Yury and Ovsiankin, Max and Tani, Erasmo},
  title =	{{Approximation Algorithms for 𝓁\underlinep-Shortest Path and 𝓁\underlinep-Group Steiner Tree}},
  booktitle =	{51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2024)},
  pages =	{111:1--111:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-322-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{297},
  editor =	{Bringmann, Karl and Grohe, Martin and Puppis, Gabriele and Svensson, Ola},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.111},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-202542},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.111},
  annote =	{Keywords: Shortest Path, Asymmetric Group Steiner Tree, Sum-of-Squares}
}
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