Related papers: On an error in the star puzzle by Henry E. Dudeney
We prove that any diagram of the unknot with c crossings may be reduced to the trivial diagram using at most (236 c)^{11} Reidemeister moves. Moreover, every diagram in this sequence has at most (7 c)^2 crossings. We also prove a similar…
A word $w$ of letters on edges of underlying graph $\Gamma$ of deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is called synchronizing if $w$ sends all states of the automaton to a unique state. J. \v{C}erny discovered in 1964 a sequence of $n$-state…
The star discrepancy is a quantitative measure of the uniformity of a point set in the unit cube. A central quantity of interest is the inverse of the star discrepancy, $N(\varepsilon, s)$, defined as the minimum number of points required…
There are thirteen types of singular points for irreducible real quartic curves and seventeen types of singular points for reducible real quartic curves. This classification is originally due to D.A. Gudkov. There are nine types of singular…
In this note, we obtain an upper bound on the maximum number of distinct non-empty palindromes in starlike trees. This bound implies, in particular, that there are at most $4n$ distinct non-empty palindromes in a starlike tree with three…
The prediction of the final state probabilities of a general cuboid randomly thrown onto a surface is a problem that naturally arises in the minds of men and women familiar with regular cubic dice and the basic concepts of probability.…
Automatic chess problem or puzzle composition typically involves generating and testing various different positions, sometimes using particular piece sets. Once a position has been generated, it is then usually tested for positional…
We have developed a program called MUDoS (Maastricht University Domineering Solver) that solves Domineering positions in a very efficient way. This enables the solution of known positions so far (up to the 10 x 10 board) much quicker…
We study the Levine hat problem, a cooperative puzzle introduced by Lionel Levine in 2010, in which $n \geq 2$ players must simultaneously identify a black hat on their own infinite stack, each seeing only their teammates' stacks. While the…
Septoku is a Sudoku variant invented by Bruce Oberg, played on a hexagonal grid of 37 cells. We show that up to rotations, reflections, and symbol permutations, there are only six valid Septoku boards. In order to have a unique solution, we…
The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…
We construct an explicit Hamiltonian cycle in the state graph of the 5-puzzle on a toroidal 2x 3 grid, a graph with 720 vertices. The cycle is described by a short symbolic sequence of 48 moves over the alphabet {L,R,V}, repeated $15$…
Let H be a closed half-space of n-dimensional Euclidean space. Suppose S is a unit sphere in H that touches the supporting hyperplane of H. The one-sided kissing number B(n) is the maximal number of unit nonoverlapping spheres in H that can…
Intriguing symmetries are uncovered regarding all magic squares of orders 3, 4, and 5, with 1, 880, and 275,305,224 distinct configurations, respectively. In analogy with the travelling salesman problem, the distributions of the total…
We define a counting function that is related to the binomial coefficients. An explicit formula for this function is proved. In some particular cases, simpler explicit formuls are derived. We also derive a formula for the number of…
In 1983 the chess periodical EG published a summary of a letter from Julius Telesin outlining how a king, a bishop and a knight can checkmate a lonely king on an arbitrarily large chessboard. The Telesin checkmating procedure doesn't seem…
Stars originate from the dense interstellar medium, which exhibits filamentary structure to scales of $\sim 1$ kpc in galaxies like our Milky Way. We explore quantitatively how much resulting large-scale correlation there is among different…
This paper proves that the maximum number of rational points on a smooth, absolutely irreducible genus 4 curve over the field of 8 elements is 25. The body of the paper shows that 27 points is not possible using techniques from algebraic…
We count the number of walks of length n on a k-node circular digraph that cover all k nodes in two ways. The first way illustrates the transfer-matrix method. The second involves counting various classes of height-restricted lattice paths.…
We investigate which planar point sets allow simultaneous straight-line embeddings of all planar graphs on a fixed number of vertices. We first show that $(1.293-o(1))n$ points are required to find a straight-line drawing of each $n$-vertex…