Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Slicing A Puzzle And Finding The Hidden Pieces, Martha Arntson

Honors Program Projects

The research conducted was to investigate the potential connections between group theory and a puzzle set up by color cubes. The goal of the research was to investigate different sized puzzles and discover any relationships between solutions of the same sized puzzles. In this research, first, there was an extensive look into the background of Abstract Algebra and group theory, which is briefly covered in the introduction. Then, each puzzle of various sizes was explored to find all possible color combinations of the solutions. Specifically, the 2x2x2, 3x3x3, and 4x4x4 puzzles were examined to find that the 2x2x2 has 24 …