Puzzle—More Logic Puzzle Apps Solved by Mathematical Programming

This paper considers six logic puzzles (i.e., single-player games) that are available as smartphone apps—namely Starbattle, V3ck, Monodot, Knight Moves, Circuit Scramble, and Binary Sudoku. For each puzzle, an integer linear programming formulation is presented (a MathProg implementation is available as well). The purpose is to provide interesting examples and exercises for teaching mathematical programming in operations research and management science lectures. The puzzles lead to a broad variety of exercises, ranging from graph models to specific constraint types such as logical and inequality constraints.