Last week we learned how Rototiler moves can unpack a cube. As a warmup, below are the moves for a 2x2x2 cube projected parallel along a cube diagonal onto hexagons:
We start at the left, remove the frontmost cube, and keep going. The solution is far from being unique, but not too complicated. Today, we do the same with a hypercube. The projection of a 1x1x1x1 into 3-space along a main diagonal is a rhombic dodecahedron, tiled by four rhomboids. These rhombic dodecahedra have 8 obtuse, 3-valent vertices at the corners of a cube, and 6 acute, 4-valent vertices at the corners of an octahedron.
There are two ways to tile the rhombic dodecahedron with these rhomboids, and changing one to the other corresponds to a rototiler move in space. Let’s do this with the 2x2x2x2 hypercube, whose projection is a rhombic dodecahedron tiled by 32 rhomboids.
At first it seems as if there is no swappable rhombic dodecahedron available, but if we remove three rhomboids and look inside (which is the direction of the fourth dimension, after all), we can see it. After swapping it, we also remove the frontmost rhomboid of the swapped dodecahedron.
We then see that the four removed rhomboids together make up another swappable dodecahedron. We replace it by its swap. The same can be done at three other places.
The next thing to do is to swap 6 more dodecahedra. One of them is the one which shows yellow and purple rhomboids in the right figure above, sitting between the red and blue “vertex”. All these dodecahedra correspond to the edges of the tetrahedron whose vertices are the already swapped four peripheral dodecahedra. Doing these six swaps leads to a tiling very much like the one above to the right, where now the other four obtuse vertices mark swappable dodecahedra. Swapping these and finally the hidden central dodecahedron completely unpacks the hypercube. It took us 1+4+6+4+6+1 = 32 swaps, as expected.
Next week we’ll see what this is good for…
The Inner Frame 