Graph Theory puzzles to try at home!
1. The 5 Room House Puzzle
Can you draw a continuous path
(that is, without taking your pen
off the paper) through each of
the doors of these 5 rooms,
without going through any door
twice, and without the path
crossing over itself? The path
can, of course, end in any room,
not necessarily in the room from
where it started.
Solution
To turn this into a graph theory
problem, turn each room into a
node and then connect two
nodes if there is a direct path
joining the two rooms. The
green nodes denote those with
an even number of edges
coming out of them and the red
ones have an odd number of
edges. As we learnt in class, the
problem is impossible if there
are more than two red nodes
(which there are).
2. The Wolf, the Sheep and the Turnip
This is a classic problem! Dr Julia is standing on the side of a river with a
wolf, a sheep and a turnip. She has a boat that is so small that it can only
hold herself and one of the three objects. However, if she leaves the
wolf alone with the sheep on the side of the river then the wolf will eat
the sheep, and if she leaves the sheep with the turnip then the sheep
will eat the turnip. Thankfully, wolves do not like to eat turnips. How can
Dr Julia get all the items safely to the other side of the river? And how
can this be formulated in terms of graphs?
Solution
It isnt so hard to solve this problem without graphs, but it has a nice graph theory
formulation. First we need to design some notation to tell us what state the animals
are in. We are going to use the symbol (W,S,T) where each of W, S and T are 0 if the
object is on the left bank and is 1 if the object is on the right bank. So we have:
(0,0,0)
(1,0,0)
(0,1,0)
(0,0,1)
(1,1,0)
(0,1,1)
(1,0,1)
(1,1,1)
Our initial state, with all three on the left side of the river.
The wolf has crossed the river, but not the sheep or the turnip.
The sheep has crossed the river, but not the wolf or the turnip.
The turnip has crossed the river, but not the wolf or the sheep.
The wolf and the sheep have crossed the river, but not the turnip.
The sheep and the turnip have crossed the river, but not the wolf.
The wolf and turnip have crossed the river, but not the sheep.
Our desired state, where all three have crossed the river.
We can think of these symbols as 3-dimensional coordinates and draw ourselves a
nice picture:
Now we need to delete the forbidden edges, so we dont leave behind any of the
objects that might eat each other. This means the edge joining (0,0,0) to (1,0,0) is
forbidden, for example, because the sheep and the turnip are left behind and the
sheep would eat the turnip.
Now all we need to do is find a path from (0,0,0) to (1,1,1)! It is clear that there are
two possible solutions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Move sheep to other side.
Move turnip to other side.
Move sheep back.
Move wolf to other side.
Move sheep to other side.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Move sheep to other side.
Move wolf to other side.
Move sheep back.
Move turnip to other side.
Move sheep to other side.
3. The Handshaking Puzzle (hard!)
In a party of people, some of whom shake hands, prove that an even
number of people must have shaken an odd number of other people's
hands.
(Euler actually proved this result in the same paper where he found the
solution to the Knigsberg Bridges problem.)
Solution
Let the people at the party be the nodes of a graph, and there is an edge between
nodes if those two people have shaken hands.
For example, in this party we have 5
people labelled A,,E. Person C has
shaken hands with person D, who
has also shaken hands with A and B.
Let eA be the number of edges
coming out of node A. This tells us
the number of people that person A
has shaken hands with. Similarly for
eB, eC and so on.
Now we add up these numbers to
get the sum eA + eB + eC +. This number has to be equal to twice the number of
handshakes which took place (i.e. twice the number of edges) because we included
each handshake twice once for each person doing the handshake.
So we can deduce that the sum eA + eB + eC +. is an even number. In that case, it
must be that an even number of the numbers eA, eB, eC, ... is odd. (Because if an odd
number of the numbers were odd, it couldnt sum to an even number). This is the
same as saying that the number of people who shook hands an odd number of times
is even.
