In my talk next week I will be discussing the mathematics behind the popular children’s Card game Spot It!. This game has a fascinating trick where any pair of cards will only have one matching symbol between them. At first glance this seems impossible, or highly unlikely. How do you design for this. Upon further inspection, it is an application of the finite projective plane and graph theory. I will discuss building up the plane, the theoretical missing cards in Spot It, and the relation to other games.
I have not taken graph theory, so I am especially interested in gaining an introduction to the topic and hearing about your application. Spot It! is a very fun game, but I had never previously thought of it as a game supported by math. I am very excited to learn more about the mathematics behind it and discover how graph theory is involved. I think this application is very clever and creative!
I am sorry that I forgot to comment on your blog post before it happened Kiernan. I grew up playing Spot It with my family, and it is much more enjoyable than Set. Your topic was very interesting involving many different aspects of mathematics that could be applied in different ways. I really enjoyed the portion on modular arithmetic as it is a huge part of computer programming and data science.
I actually hadn’t heard of this card game before your mention of it, so I will have to find time to play this sometime! (especially if it is better than Set) As I am sure you know, I loved graph theory so I enjoyed hearing about this application to a fun card game. I also found the missing cards and why they were missing interesting!