Wikipedia

Icosian game

The icosian game is a mathematical game invented in 1856 by Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton. It involves finding a Hamiltonian cycle on a dodecahedron, a cycle using edges of the dodecahedron that passes through all its vertices. Hamilton sold his work to a game manufacturing company, but it was not commercially succesful. Although Hamilton was not the first to study Hamiltonian cycles, his work on this game became the origin of the name of Hamiltonian cycles.

Modern reconstruction of Hamilton's icosian game, on display at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of São Paulo

Game play edit

 
A Hamiltonian cycle on a dodecahedron
 
Planar view of the same cycle

The game's object is to find a cycle among along the edges of a regular dodecahedron, returning to its starting vertex after visiting each vertex a single time. (A cycle visiting all vertices in this way is now called a Hamiltonian cycle.) In a two-player version of the game, one player starts by choosing five consecutive vertices along the cycle, and the other player must complete the cycle.[1]

One version of the game took the form of a flat wooden board inscribed with a planar graph with the same combinatorial structure as the dodecahedron (a Schlegel diagram),[2] with holes for numbered pegs to be placed at its vertices. The cycle found by game players was indicated by the consecutive numbering of the pegs.[3][4] Another version was shaped as a "partially flattened dodecahedron" with a handle attached to its base. The vertices had fixed pegs. A separate string, with a loop at one end, was wound through these pegs to indicate the cycle.[4]

The game was too easy to play to achieve much popularity.[5][6]

Background edit

 
William Rowan Hamilton, the inventor of the icosian game

At the time of his invention of the icosian game, William Rowan Hamilton was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, and was already famous for his work on Hamiltonian mechanics and his invention of quaternions.[7] The motivation for Hamilton was the problem of understanding the symmetries of the dodecahedron and icosahedron, two dual polyhedra that have the same symmetries as each other. For this purpose he also invented icosian calculus, a system of non-commutative algebra which he used to compute these symmetries.[8]

The name of the icosian game comes from the fact that the icosahedron has twenty faces, the dodecahedron has twenty vertices, and any cycle through all the vertices of the dodecahedron has twenty edges. Icosa is a Greek root meaning twenty. [6][9] On a dodecahedron with labeled vertices, there are 30 different ways that these vertices could be connected to each other to form a Hamiltonian cycle. However, without the labels, the resulting cycles are all symmetric to each other under rotations and reflections of the dodecahedron.[10]

History edit

Both the icosian calculus and the icosian game were outlined by Hamilton in a series of letters to his friend John T. Graves in late 1856.[8] Hamilton then exhibited the game at the 1857 Dublin meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.[11][12] At the suggestion of Graves,[2] Hamilton sold its publishing rights to Jaques and Son, a London-based toy and game manufacturing company.[8][11]

This company marketed Hamilton's game beginning in 1859,[3] in both its handheld solid and flat forms,[4] under the lengthy titles The Travellers Dodecahedron, or a voyage around the world, and (respectively) The Icosian Game, invented by Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Royal Astronomer of Ireland; forming a new and highly amusing game for the drawing room, particularly interesting to students in mathematics of illustrating the principles of the Icosian Calculus.[3]

Several other versions of the game were sold in Europe.[10] However, it was not a commercial success.[5][6][8] Hamilton received only a £25 licensing fee from Jaques and Son for his invention.[10] Few original copies of the game are known to survive,[13] but one is kept in the library of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin,[3] and another is included in the collection of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris.[2]

Legacy edit

Although Hamilton invented the icosian game independenly, he was not the first to study Hamiltonian cycles. Knight's tours on chessboards, another puzzle based on Hamiltonian cycles, go back to the 9th century, both in India and in mathematics in the medieval Islamic world.[14] At about the same time as Hamilton, Thomas Kirkman in England was also studying Hamiltonian cycles on polyhedra.[15] Hamilton visited Kirkman in 1861, and presented him with a copy of the icosian game.[8] Despite this related work, some of which was much earlier, Hamiltonian cycles came to be named for Hamilton and for his work on the icosian game.[1]

The icosian game itself has been the topic of multiple works in recreational mathematics by well-known authors on the subject including Édouard Lucas,[16] Wilhelm Ahrens,[17] and Martin Gardner.[10] Puzzles like Hamilton's icosian game, based on finding Hamiltonian cycles in planar graphs, continue to be sold as smartphone apps.[18] Additionally, Maker-Breaker games based on Hamiltonian cycles continue to be an object of study in modern combinatorial game theory.[19][20][21][22][23][24]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b Bondy, J. A.; Murty, U. S. R. (1976), Graph Theory with Applications, North Holland, p. 53, ISBN 0-444-19451-7
  2. ^ a b c Boutin, Michel (April 2018), "Les jeux dans les collections du Conservatoire national des arts et métiers de Paris, 1 – le Jeu icosien (1859) (1re partie)" (PDF), Bulletin de la Société archéologique, historique et artistique le Vieux papier (in French) (428): 433–441, retrieved 2024-04-25
  3. ^ a b c d Turner, Gerard L'E. (October 1987), "Scientific toys", Presidential address, The British Journal for the History of Science, 20 (4): 377–398, doi:10.1017/s0007087400024195, JSTOR 4026415; see p. 395 and photo, Fig. 13, p. 397
  4. ^ a b c Applegate, David L.; Bixby, Robert E.; Chvátal, Vašek; Cook, William J. (2011), The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study (PDF), Princeton Series in Applied Mathematics, vol. 17, Princeton University Press, pp. 18–20, ISBN 9781400841103
  5. ^ a b Darling, David, "Icosian game", Encyclopedia of Science, retrieved 2024-04-24
  6. ^ a b c Sowell, Katye O. (2001), "Hamilton's icosian calculus and his icosian game", Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal (24), Article 14
  7. ^ Mukunda, N. (June 2016), "Sir William Rowan Hamilton: Life, achievements, stature in physics", Resonance, 21 (6): 493–510, doi:10.1007/s12045-016-0356-y
  8. ^ a b c d e Biggs, Norman (1995), "The icosian calculus of today", Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 95: 23–34, JSTOR 20490184, MR 1649815
  9. ^ Borkar, Vivek S.; Ejov, Vladimir; Filar, Jerzy A.; Nguyen, Giang T. (2012), "1.1: The graph that started it all", Hamiltonian Cycle Problem and Markov Chains, International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, New York: Springer, pp. 3–4, doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3232-6, ISBN 9781461432326
  10. ^ a b c d Gardner, Martin (May 1957), "Mathematical Games: About the remarkable similarity between the Icosian Game and the Tower of Hanoi", Scientific American, vol. 196, no. 5, JSTOR 24940862
  11. ^ a b Barnett, Janet Heine (2009), "Early Writings on Graph Theory: Hamiltonian Circuits and The Icosian Game", in Hopkins, Brian (ed.), Resources for Teaching Discrete Mathematics: Classroom Projects, History Modules, and Articles, Mathematical Association of America, pp. 217–224, doi:10.5948/upo9780883859742.028
  12. ^ Hamilton, W. R. (1858), "On the icosian calculus", Report of the Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London: John Murray, p. 3 – via Hathitrust
  13. ^ Dalgety, James (July 2002), "The Icosian Game", The Puzzle Museum, retrieved 2024-04-25
  14. ^ Watkins, John J. (2004), "Chapter 2: Knight's Tours", Across the Board: The Mathematics of Chessboard Problems, Princeton University Press, pp. 25–38, ISBN 978-0-691-15498-5.
  15. ^ Biggs, N. L. (1981), "T. P. Kirkman, mathematician", The Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, 13 (2): 97–120, doi:10.1112/blms/13.2.97, MR 0608093.
  16. ^ Lucas, Édouard (1883), "Septième récréation – le jeu d'Hamilton", Récréations mathématiques (in French), vol. 2, Paris: Gauthier-Villars, pp. 201–227
  17. ^ Ahrens, Wilhelm (1918), "XVII: Das Hamiltonische Dodekaederspiel", Mathematische Unterhaltungen und Spiele (in German), vol. 2, Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, pp. 196–210
  18. ^ Fernau, Henning; Haase, Carolina; Hoffmann, Stefan (2022), "The synchronization game on subclasses of automata", in Fraigniaud, Pierre; Uno, Yushi (eds.), 11th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms, FUN 2022, May 30 to June 3, 2022, Island of Favignana, Sicily, Italy, LIPIcs, vol. 226, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, pp. 14:1–14:17, doi:10.4230/LIPICS.FUN.2022.14
  19. ^ Lu, Xiaoyun (1992), "Hamiltonian games", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 55 (1): 18–32, doi:10.1016/0095-8956(92)90030-2, MR 1159853
  20. ^ Hefetz, Dan; Krivelevich, Michael; Stojaković, Miloš; Szabó, Tibor (2009), "A sharp threshold for the Hamilton cycle Maker-Breaker game", Random Structures & Algorithms, 34 (1): 112–122, doi:10.1002/rsa.20252, MR 2478541
  21. ^ Hefetz, Dan; Stich, Sebastian (2009), "On two problems regarding the Hamiltonian cycle game", Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 16 (1), Research Paper 28, doi:10.37236/117, MR 2482096
  22. ^ Krivelevich, Michael (2011), "The critical bias for the Hamiltonicity game is  ", Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 24 (1): 125–131, doi:10.1090/S0894-0347-2010-00678-9, MR 2726601
  23. ^ Stojaković, Miloš; Trkulja, Nikola (2021), "Hamiltonian maker-breaker games on small graphs", Experimental Mathematics, 30 (4): 595–604, doi:10.1080/10586458.2019.1586599, MR 4346657
  24. ^ Brüstle, Noah; Clusiau, Sarah; Narayan, Vishnu V.; Ndiaye, Ndiamé; Reed, Bruce; Seamone, Ben (2023), "The speed and threshold of the biased perfect matching and Hamilton cycle games", Discrete Applied Mathematics, 332: 23–40, doi:10.1016/j.dam.2023.01.031, MR 4545149

Further reading edit

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