Date of Award
4-5-2021
Document Type
Honors Thesis
Department
Mathematics
First Advisor
Anthony Bosman
Abstract
The snake cube is a popular puzzle that has been analyzed for its computational difficulty and shown to be NP-complete. Conceiving of the puzzle as a Hamiltonian path in an n x n x n graph, we offer a novel mathematical analysis by considering invariants of the puzzle. This allows us to determine necessary conditions for a particular snake cube to be solvable and eliminate a large class of possible puzzles as unsolvable. In particular, we establish upper and lower bounds on the possible number of straight components in solvable snake cube puzzles.
Recommended Citation
Negrea, Adrian, "Computational Difficulty and Invariants of the Snake Cube Puzzle" (2021). Honors Theses. 255.
https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/255/
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/honors/255
Subject Area
Snake cube puzzle; Mathematics--Problems, exercises, etc.; Invariants;
Presentation Record URL
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/honors-undergraduate-poster-symposium/2021/symposium/25/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/255/