English

Most Clicks Problem in Lights Out

Combinatorics 2022-07-05 v5 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Consider a game played on a simple graph G=(V,E)G = (V, E) where each vertex consists of a clickable light. Clicking any vertex vv toggles the on/off state of vv and its neighbors. Starting from an initial configuration of lights, one wins the game by finding a solution: a sequence of clicks that turns off all the lights. When GG is a 5×55 \times 5 grid, this game was commercially available from Tiger Electronics as Lights Out. Restricting ourselves to solvable initial configurations, we pose a natural question about this game, the Most Clicks Problem (MCP): How many clicks does a worst-case initial configuration on GG require to solve? The answer to the MCP is already known for nullity 0 graphs: those on which every initial configuration is solvable. Generalizing a technique from Scherphius, we give an upper bound to the MCP for all grids of size (6k1)×(6k1)(6k - 1) \times (6k - 1). We show the value given by this upper bound exactly solves the MCP for all nullity 2 grids of this size. We conjecture that all nullity 2 grids are of size (6k1)×(6k1)(6k - 1) \times (6k - 1), which would mean we solve the MCP for all nullity 2 square grids.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.03452,
  title  = {Most Clicks Problem in Lights Out},
  author = {William Boyles},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.03452},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:45:10.580Z