# Counting Candy Crush Configurations

• Published in 2019
In the collections
A k-stable c-coloured Candy Crush grid is a weak proper c-colouring of a particular type of k-uniform hypergraph. In this paper we introduce a fully polynomial randomised approximation scheme (FPRAS) which counts the number of k-stable c-coloured Candy Crush grids of a given size (m, n) for certain values of c and k. We implemented this algorithm on Matlab, and found that in a Candy Crush grid with7 available colours there are approximately 4.3*10^61 3-stable colourings. (Note that, typical Candy Crush games are played with 6 colours and our FPRAS is not guaranteed to work in expected polynomial time with k= 3 and c= 6.) We also discuss the applicability of this FPRAS to the problem of counting the number of weak c-colourings of other, more general hypergraphs.

### BibTeX entry

@article{CountingCandyCrushConfigurations,
title = {Counting Candy Crush Configurations},
abstract = {A k-stable c-coloured Candy Crush grid is a weak proper c-colouring of a
particular type of k-uniform hypergraph. In this paper we introduce a fully
polynomial randomised approximation scheme (FPRAS) which counts the number of
k-stable c-coloured Candy Crush grids of a given size (m, n) for certain values
of c and k. We implemented this algorithm on Matlab, and found that in a Candy
Crush grid with7 available colours there are approximately 4.3*10^61 3-stable
colourings. (Note that, typical Candy Crush games are played with 6 colours and
our FPRAS is not guaranteed to work in expected polynomial time with k= 3 and
c= 6.) We also discuss the applicability of this FPRAS to the problem of
counting the number of weak c-colourings of other, more general hypergraphs.},
url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09996v1 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09996v1},
year = 2019,
author = {Adam Hamilton and Giang T. Nguyen and Matthew Roughan},
comment = {},
urldate = {2021-01-06},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
eprint = {1908.09996},
primaryClass = {math.CO},
collections = {combinatorics,games-to-play-with-friends}
}