Most Clicks Problem in Lights Out
Abstract
Consider a game played on a simple graph where each vertex consists of a clickable light. Clicking any vertex toggles the on/off state of 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 is a 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 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 . 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 , 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