REU at Kent State University

Mailing address

Contact

REU 11

Application of integer programming to the ZB Method for Rubik's Cube (Morley Davidson)
Project Description: The Zborowski-Bruchem system is well known among Rubik's Cube experts as an advanced "endgame" approach which could be particularly useful in fewest-moves competition. But to date the ZB system has resisted wide adoption because it seems to require far more memorized move sequences than other common approaches. In this REU project students will investigate the possibility of extending the usual symmetry, inverse, and free-turn reductions of the required number of move sequences with so-called "concatenation" reductions and possibly other reduction ideas as well. The idea is to create a sparse integer programming model to which standard solution methods might be applied. In the case of sparse linear models, certifiably optimal solutions can often be found even if the number of variables and constraints is fairly large.

Minkowski Length of Lattice Polytopes (Jenya Soprunova) We will study properties of the Minkowski length of polytopes in relation with toric codes. Project Description

Exploring Expander Families of Vertex Transitive Graphs (Don White, Steve Gagola) Project Description

Participants: Ian Barnett, Benjamin Fulan, Candice Quinn, William Kanegis, Zhiyuan Lu, Peggy Sah, Bradley Weaver, Amy Beard, Emily Heath, Andrew Zeller