The
Original Lights Out! Webpage
The first (c. 1996) page so devoted to the worship of this neato
Tiger toy.
Bored of two dimensional Lights Out? Tiger sold a Lights Out Cube for
awhile in 1998.
There's also Lights Out 2000
complete with multi-colored LEDs, "battle" mode, and "digitized sound."
Manuals
I grabbed the manuals from Tiger. They are PDF format. I zipped them up to save space, though.
Solutions!
Here are the solutions to the first twenty-five problems in the style of the Lights Out manual. I've also received all 50 solutions to "Mode 1." in graphical form.
Solvers
Christopher Dannemiller sent in another solver. (A "smart," non-brute force version) Download the zipped program and level files and/or take a look at the readme file. If you're into programming, here's the source code in C++. (It compiled w/o errors in MSVC++ 5.0) The algorithm comes from David Guichard, a math professor at Whitman College. His Java version of the game is one of the links below.
Robert L. Henderson sent me a brute-force Lights Out solver! His
explanation of it's operation: " . . . [it tries] all 25 ways of pressing
1 button, then all 25 * 24 / 2 = 300 ways of pressing 2 buttons, etc.
until the "lit" cells match the puzzle board. Of course, pressing the
same buttons again will turn them all off." I've included his original
Pascal source code and an improved QuickBasic version (Mr. Henderson
points out that most machines have QBasic installed; type "qbasic" at your
DOS prompt to see if you've got it.) I'll try to put a DOS executable
program on the web either made from this QuickBasic version or a C
translation. If you know a little about programming, take a look at the
source and send me your comments; I'll pass them along to the author.
Al
Geist has developed a Lights Out Java
applet that does most of the work for you! Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at
it), Mr. Geist declined to share the source code for the applet. However, he was kind enough to share a
little insight into his solving algorithm in these e-mail conversations.
Courtney McFarren's page explains the method used by Geist. It includes the lookup-table used once the lights have been chased to the bottom row.
Publications
Or, you could simply use plain old math! Several people have pointed me to "Turning lights out with
linear algebra," an article that appeared in Vol. 71, Issue 4 of Mathematics Magazine (Washington; Oct
1998). It was written by Marlow Anderson and Todd Feil. The article is copyrighted by the Mathmatical
Assoc. of America, so I cannot link to it, but if you have any background in matrix math, go to the
library and read this. It's about 4 pages with figures.
A neat article appears in the October 2001 issue of Mathematics Magazine describing the game and a solution from two different perspectives: the first as a curious puzzle fan, the second as a mathematician:
Two reflected analyses of lights out; Oscar Martin-Sanchez; Mathematics Magazine, Washington; Oct 2001; Vol. 74, Iss. 4; pg. 295, 10 pgs
Resources related the that article are at the magazine's website. The magazine is part of the online ProQuest Research Library which many Universities and Public Libraries have access to.
Rafael Losada writes: "I converted the
supposed exponential problem in a simple linear problem." Currently, the
explanation is in the Spanish journal: SUMA (number 40, June 2002). See
his webpage for details.
Links:
(working as of 1/31/2003)
Feedback
Please make me aware of any
mistakes. Or simply send suggestions, comments, 'thank you's,' etc.
Back to Ken's homepage
The counter says you're visitor 
