The Most Amazing Fact About Light Switching Puzzles (SoME1)

#SoME1 #SummerOfMathExposition

In the classic Lights Out game, you get some starting light pattern and you have to turn all the lights off, but it turns out that the game creators had to be careful to make sure that they wouldn't present you with an unsolvable starting pattern.

I'd like to show you a variation of Lights Out called Lamp Lighter, where all lights start off and you have to turn them on, but the game can challenge you with any setup. Amazingly, Lamp Lighter will always have a solution, and we can prove it from very basic principles.

The journey is totally worth it.

0:00 - Lights Out
0:30 - Lamp Lighter
1:57 - Menu
2:32 - Induction
5:03 - Exhaustion
6:24 - Construction
12:08 - Food for Thought