Hello all! For my 45 minute talk I will be talking about the game, Lights Out, and different forms of the game. Lights Out is usually played on a 5×5 grid, with 25 buttons. And pressing a button, will toggle nearby lights. The goal of the game is simple, right? To get all the lights off! Instead of pressing random buttons, and hoping your lucky, we will take a much more mathematical approach to this game.
We will explore how to solve different sizes of the board, and look more into the question of, “If given any board, can we truly solve it?” To find out if the creators of Lights Out are truly evil, and would force you to solve an unsolvable board, you will have to wait till Wednesday! Hope to see you there!
Great presentation Mike! It is interesting to think that certain board sizes have all games winnable, while others do not. I wonder what other ways you can analyze this game. I am sure you can add additional players or modify it in a different way that brings up interesting questions. Very cool!
This was a lot of fun! I love seeing how games can be solved mathematically, and this was one that I hadn’t encountered before. Very interesting and very well explained as well. I was able to follow along with ease, without any of it feeling too simplified. Excellent job!
Awesome job on the presentation Mike. I found the presentation well informative and interesting. Your concept on Lights out and variants games using the mathematical approach was new and I haven’t thought about that. So I was thinking if these concepts are what the game developer was using when they were creating a character(avatar) in the games. Again, good job!