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poulson | 11 years ago

Thanks for the link! There is even a nice discussion of the explicit solutions for Inverter up to 7x7's on the page: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LightsOutPuzzle.html

Almost nothing about the solver would need to change in order to support computation over GF(p), which suggests that someone should create a version of Lights Out / Inverter which cycles through a prime number of colors rather than just off/on.

discuss

order

chaoxu|11 years ago

I think it would work for all finite fields. One of the solutions to this IOI problem was solved that way, and it's not of the form GF(p) but it's GF(p^2). http://olympiads.win.tue.nl/ioi/ioi94/contest/day2prb1/probl... see solution 2: http://olympiads.win.tue.nl/ioi/ioi94/contest/day2prb1/solut...

poulson|11 years ago

Good point. So it would seem to be hard to find solutions for 6, 10, 12, etc. colors. Have you given any thought to how to solve those cases?