Lights Out
Lights Out is a mathematical puzzle that lives on an $n \times n$ where each cell of the grid is one of two colors: either red or white. The goal is to eventually get all the cells in the grid to be red. You can play the game below:
Background
The original setup involves a $5 \times 5$ board, on whose cells a user may “click.” Clicking a cell will not only flip the color of that cell, but also flip the color of all the neigbors to its north, east, south, and west (call this rule Adjacent). But the original variant of the game introduced to me followed a different rule Same Row & Col: any click flips the color of all cells sharing the same row or column as the clicked cell. Another variant involves all cells sharing the same diagonal (without any wrapping), called Diagonals.
There is a general strategy for solving an $n \times n$ board following the Same Row & Col rule whenever $n$ is odd. There’s a different strategy that works under the same rule but for $n$ being even. I’m not aware of general strategies otherwise… let me know if you find one!
Implementation
Implemented in TypeScript with strict mode enabled. The project utilizes static type-checking, union types, and interfaces.
Video
Watch the teaser video I made for Lights Out in Manim.
GitHub Repository
