Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.
Snake-in-the-Box-Problem [Explained]
Transcript
[A panel with text both above and below the illustration, with further text outside the panel below.] [In the panel, above the illustration:] A snake slithers around a hypercube. No two non-consecutive parts of its coils can be on adjacent corners. [Three small illustrations of 4-dimensional hypercubes, each with a snake slithering around its edges. Each illustration has a red line or lines indicating an edge or edges where two non-consecutive parts of the snake are on adjacent corners. Below each hypercube is a red X.] [A large illustration depicting a 4-dimensional hypercube with a snake slithering around its edges.] [Below the large illustration is text printed in green. To the left of the text is a green checkmark.] Dimensions=4 Max length=7 [The following text is printed in black, except for the last word "UNSOLVED" which is printed in red:] Snake(N) = Largest snake that can fit in an N-dimensional hypercube Snake(N=1, 2, 3 .. 8) = 1, 2, 4, 7, 13, 26, 50, 98 Snake(N>8) = UNSOLVED
[Text outside the panel:] It turns out every scientific field has a key thought experiment that involves putting a cute animal in a weird box for no reason. So far, quantum mechanics and graph theory have found theirs, but most other fields are still working on it.
