English

Board games, random boards and long boards

Combinatorics 2025-03-05 v1

Abstract

For any odd integer n3n\geq3 a board (of size nn) is a square array of n×nn\times n positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to the center of the square. If there exists such a path we say that the board is solvable, and we say that the length of this board is the length of a shortest such path. There are 8n28^{n^2} different boards. We discuss various properties of these boards and present some questions and conjectures. In particular, we show that for n1n\gg1 roughly 13\frac{1}{3} of the boards are solvable, and that the expected length of a random solvable board tends to 20996\frac{209}{96}, i.e., very big solvable boards tend to have extremely short solutions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.05416,
  title  = {Board games, random boards and long boards},
  author = {Ary Shaviv},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05416},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

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R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:47:59.749Z