alt Hacker NewsThere Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order
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Al Zimmerman ran some related contests last year:
Why is not every 45 degree line considered for the rectangular grids?
(In the hexagons, all lines are considered even if they don't have the maximum length)
(PS: make sure you hover your mouse over the diagrams)
Huh, this potential technique seems fairly neat. Thank you for explaining the whole thing in a fairly accessible way. Enjoyable interactive bits as well. An aside is that the playground looked fine on my iPhone. The anticipatory objection of smallness did not materialize.
my immediate first thought is that I've never heard of the consecutive constraint before, or that if I have I have forgotten about it. I've only ever heard of a uniqueness constraint, that no number can be used twice, which still achieves the same goal of preventing filling every cell with exactly one number.
Then again, I do mostly remember this in terms of the yet unsolved magic-square-of-squares problem, not the standard magic square.
Cool problem. I always doing it a bit unsatisfying that magic hexagons so trivially disallowed solutions that aren't order 3. Starting at a different index is a nice modification, especially since for magic squares it's an equally hard problem.
He says "every order" is solvable this way but I don't think any solution could work for an order 2 hexagon, even without his simplifying constraints (since fixing any side cell to x requires 2 cells to be set to sum-x).
Good stuff. Maybe I missed it in the post, but I didn't see a formal proof of the conjecture?
Hexagon is the bestagon!
an amazing discovery!
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I loved this article and its interactive elements. The potential field is an elegant abstraction which really elevates this from a math puzzle into something new.
I'd love to see just how Lipschitz continuous, how smooth, the potential field can be; how adding features puts it closer to or further from solutions that fit the consecutive-no-duplicate constraint, say. Adding a smooth 'hill' is probably viable; is a 'river'?
One little critique I have is in the latter third. Using LLMs for proof is pretty standard now, but the way the text focuses on their tribulations was distracting. It might have been cleaner to use the mathematician's "we" after introducing the 'co-authors', so that the casual reader might sink their teeth into the math rather than be reminded LLMs can sometimes cost money and go around in loops.
But otherwise this is a really gorgeous article! The visualisation is really powerful, and something about how the symmetries impose a kind of conservation (which looks like hot soup but actually has a smooth potential) are very exciting, and curiously very physicsy.