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Quentin L. Meunier
Associate Professor in Computer Science at Sorbonne Université

The "affaire de logique" Contest

From March to November 2017, Elisabeth Busser, Gilles Cohen and Jean-Louis Legrand organised a mathematical contest via the site Affaire de Logique, composed of 26 problems (1 per week), and numbered from 1001 to 1026. 25 of these problems have been evaluated on 40 points, for 1000 points in total.

This section gathers some problems which I have modeled with a program. I add some comments about the modelisation or the complexity, as well as the correct answer.

For all these problems, the simplest approach, which is a naive enumeration, often has too large a complexity to terminate. Writing a program which solves the problem thus requires to reduce the space exploration. Without requiring to solve the problems manually, one often has to notice some properties on the form of the solutions, and the programs often lie on the segment between a full enumeration and a manual resolution. The space exploration reduction can also be consecutive to solving the problem with a full enumerative approach, but on smaller sizes, on which we can notice some properties.