Planarity: A fun new game

Posted by Nick Loadholtes on 4/10/2006 filed in Blogging, Games, Math, Puzzles

Tired of Sudoku? Looking for a new challenge? Boy have I got something for you then. Check out Planarity.

I really like this game. If you’ve ever sat through a discreet mathematics class and wondered where and when you’ll ever use graph theory, this is your answer. Basically the site presents you with a series of nodes/vertices and you have to rearrange them until the edges (i.e. the lines between the nodes) do not overlap. The result is called a planar graph.

The first couple of levels are pretty easy, but with every level more nodes and more edges are added. This makes each level more challenging in that it takes longer to solve than the one before it. Oh, that and stopping. Once you start playing its hard to stop. I closed my eyes once and I started to imagine moving the nodes around… That’s when I knew this was a cool game. :)

Its a great idea for a website and a really fun game. I’ve always liked graph theory, there’s just something cool about it. Now thanks to this site, we have a new way to play around with the graphs and learn more about them. Additionally this site serves as a good introduction to other ideas in graphing like cycles, bipartite graphs, and minimal spanning trees.


One Response to “Planarity: A fun new game”

  1. jerry chen Says:
    April 17th, 2006 at 12:26 am

    there’s a formula u can use to calculate whether a non-crossing layout of the mesh exists. but pretty cool doing it yourself though.

    and here’s something unrelated as usual..

    remember i mentioned something about aggregating the Internet’s information that isn’t alreading in a DB into a DB?

    i think these guys are heading in the right direction..
    doh. stole my idea.

    http://www.hivegroup.com/products.html

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