Related papers: Lights Out Puzzle in p Colors: Evolution of Quiet …
Lights Out! is a game played on a $5 \times 5$ grid of lights, or more generally on a graph. Pressing lights on the grid allows the player to turn off neighboring lights. The goal of the game is to start with a given initial configuration…
Lights Out is a single-player electronic handheld game from the 1990s that features a 5 by 5 grid of light-up buttons. The game begins with some lights on and others off. The goal is to turn off all lights but pressing a button changes its…
Consider a game played on a simple graph $G = (V, E)$ where each vertex consists of a clickable light. Clicking any vertex $v$ toggles the on/off state of $v$ and its neighbors. Starting from an initial configuration of lights, one wins the…
In this work, we study a triangular variant of the Lights Out game, proposed in the 2025 Capixaba Mathematics Olympiad. We present a combinatorial description of the game, formally characterize its operations, and introduce the notion of a…
Lights out is a game that can be played on any simple graph $G$. A configuration assigns one of the two states \emph{on} or \emph{off} to each vertex. For a given configuration, the aim of the game is to turn all vertices \emph{off} by…
We model the Lights Out game on general simple graphs in the framework of linear algebra over the field $\mathbb F_2$. Based upon a version of the Fredholm alternative, we introduce a separating invariant of the game, i.e., an initial state…
In this paper we study a variant of the solitaire game Lights-Out, where the player's goal is to turn off a grid of lights. This variant is a two-player impartial game where the goal is to make the final valid move. This version is playable…
Lights Out is a game played on a graph $G$ where every vertex has a light bulb that is either on or off, and pressing a vertex $v$ toggles the state of every vertex in the closed neighborhood of $v$. The goal is to find a subset of vertices…
Lights Out is a game which can be played on any graph $G$. Initially we have a configuration which assigns one of the two states on or off to each vertex. The aim of the game is to turn all vertices to off state for an initial configuration…
Let $\mathbb{F}$ be any field, we consider solving $Ax=b$ repeatedly for a matrix $A\in\mathbb{F}^{n\times n}$ of $m$ non-zero elements, and multiple different $b\in\mathbb{F}^{n}$. If we are given a zero forcing set of $A$ of size $k$, we…
The theory behind the Lights Out game has been developed by several authors. The aim of this work is to present some results related to this game using Linear Algebra. We establish a criterion for the solubility of this game in the case of…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
A configuration of a graph is an assignment of one of two states, on or off, to each vertex of it. A regular move at a vertex changes the states of the neighbors of that vertex. A valid move is a regular move at an on vertex. The following…
We study the generalization of the game Lights Out in which the standard square grid board is replaced by a graph. We examine the probability that, when a graph is chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices and $e$…
The Gale-Berlekamp Light Switching Game is played on a square board of lights. Each light has two states, either on or off. There is a switch to every row and column. Turning this switch would change the state of all the lights on that row…
Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with…
Neighborhood Lights Out is a game played on graphs. Begin with a graph and a vertex labeling of the graph from the set $\{0,1,2,\dots, \ell-1\}$ for $\ell \in \mathbb{N}$. The game is played by toggling vertices: when a vertex is toggled,…
We give an elementary inductive proof of a classical result for the \emph{Lights Out problem} on graphs: from any configuration of vertices, one can reach the complementary configuration by a sequence of moves, where a move consists of…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
A Cellular Automata (CA) rule is presented that can generate "loop patterns" in a 2D grid under fixed boundary conditions. A loop is a cyclically closed path represented by one-cells enclosed by zero-cells. A loop pattern can contain…