Polydrafter
Geometric shape formed of right triangles
In recreational mathematics, a polydrafter is a polyform with a 30°-60°-90° right triangle as the base form. This triangle is also called a drafting triangle, hence the name. This triangle is also half of an equilateral triangle, and a polydrafter's cells must consist of halves of triangles in the triangular tiling of the plane; consequently, when two drafters share an edge that is the middle of their three edge lengths, they must be reflections rather than rotations of each other. Any contiguous subset of halves of triangles in this tiling is allowed, so unlike most polyforms, a polydrafter may have cells joined along unequal edges: a hypotenuse and a short leg.
01History
Polydrafters were invented by Christopher Monckton, who used the name polydudes for polydrafters that have no cells attached only by the length of a short leg. Monckton's Eternity Puzzle was composed of 209 12-dudes.
The term polydrafter was coined by Ed Pegg Jr., who also proposed as a puzzle the task of fitting the 14 tridrafters, all possible clusters of three drafters, into a trapezoid whose sides are 2, 3, 5, and 3 times the length of the hypotenuse of a drafter.
02Extended polydrafters
An extended polydrafter is a variant in which the drafter cells cannot all conform to the triangle (polyiamond) grid. The cells are still joined at short legs, long legs, hypotenuses and half-hypotenuses. See the Logelium link below.
03Enumerating polydrafters
Like polyominoes, polydrafters can be enumerated in two ways, depending on whether chiral pairs of polydrafters are counted as one polydrafter or two.
| n | Name of n-polydrafter |
Number of n-polydrafters (reflections counted separately) |
Number of free n-polydudes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| free (sequence A056842 in the OEIS) |
one-sided (sequence A217720 in the OEIS) | |||
| 1 | monodrafter | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| 2 | didrafter | 6 | 8 | 3 |
| 3 | tridrafter | 14 | 28 | 1 |
| 4 | tetradrafter | 64 | 116 | 9 |
| 5 | pentadrafter | 237 | 474 | 15 |
| 6 | hexadrafter | 1024 | 2001 | 59 |
With two or more cells, the numbers are greater if extended polydrafters are included. For example, the number of didrafters rises from 6 to 13. See (sequence A289137 in the OEIS).
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Polydrafter”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Monodrafter.png by Herbee at English Wikipedia / Later version(s) were uploaded by Nonenmac, Pbroks13 at English Wikipedia., Public domain
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