Corbet Elkins, DIMACS REU 2025
DIMACS
DIMACS REU 2025

General Information

Student: Corbet Elkins
Office: CoRE 415
School: Purdue University
Contact: ce383@rutgers.edu
Project: Multi-Robot Path Planning: Structural Studies and High-Performance Algorithms
Mentor: Jingjin Yu

Project Description

Research Log

Week 1 (5/26-5/30)

Read through various proposed projects, ultimately deciding to work on the Rubiks Table problem. Tried several reductions to work towards the current goal. Worked on the initial presentation.

Current Goal: Prove minimizing parallel shuffles for the Rubiks Table problem is NP-hard.

Week 2 (6/2-6/6)

Continued working on showing NP-hardness of minimizing parallel shuffles. I believe I have a reduction after much trial and error.

Current Goal: Prove minimizing shuffles for the Rubiks table is NP-hard in the general setting.

Week 3 (6/16-6/20)

Got some minor results with regards to the Rubiks table problem. I started looking into some other related problems. One of which is a polyomino problem where we want to stack polyominoes such that we can always see at least one block from each.

Current Goal: Think about the polyomino problem

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by NSF grant CCF-2447342