Can Rotating Three Tiles Reach Every Hexagon Tiling?

A one-minute puzzle asks whether a simple local rotation can connect every rhombus tiling of a hexagon.

채널
3Blue1Brown
게시일
2024년 11월 13일
영상
1:00
읽기
1분
슬라이드
2
원문
영어
YouTube에서 열기
스크롤하면 영상이 오른쪽 아래로 작아져 계속 재생됩니다. 자막은 읽기 언어를 따릅니다.
읽기 언어2개 언어로 읽을 수 있음
이 글은 아직 한국어 번역이 없어 영어 원문으로 표시합니다.
요약

30초 요약

3Blue1Brown introduces a hexagonal tiling puzzle: rotate any three rhombuses that form a smaller hexagon, then ask whether repeated rotations can connect every valid tiling. The short poses the question and points to a longer video; it does not give the solution.

  1. 1Build the tilingTile a hexagon with equal rhombuses whose angles are 60° and 120°.
  2. 2Rotate a local hexagonThree rhombuses forming a smaller hexagon can be rotated by 60°.
  3. 3Ask about reachabilityCan a sequence of these moves transform any tiling into any other?

핵심 정리

  1. The large hexagon is tiled with congruent 60°–120° rhombuses.
  2. Three tiles that form a small hexagon can be rotated by 60° to create a new tiling.
  3. The puzzle asks whether those local moves connect every possible tiling; the short leaves the answer open.
전문

챕터별로 다듬은 전문 읽기

원본 자막만 보기
01

The tiles and the move

A large hexagon is tiled with rhombuses. Three tiles forming a small hexagon can be rotated together.

A hexagon tiled with rhombuses
슬라이드 1 / 2A hexagon tiled with rhombusesEach tile has 60° and 120° angles.

Here is a tiling puzzle. Start with a hexagon whose side length is a whole-number multiple of the side of a small tile. Fill it with congruent rhombuses, each with angles of 60° and 120°.

The local rotation
슬라이드 2 / 2The local rotationThree rhombuses form a small hexagon that can be rotated into a different arrangement.

Whenever three rhombuses form a smaller hexagon, rotate that little hexagon by 60°. The move creates a different local tiling and can reveal other small hexagons that were not present before, making further rotations possible.

02

The question

The puzzle asks whether every tiling is reachable from every other. The short directs viewers to a longer video for the underlying insight.

Using only these moves, can you always get from any tiling of the large hexagon to any other? The short leaves the question for the viewer and points to a longer video with several puzzles and unexpected solutions. The presenter suggests that seeing the picture in the right way reveals the key insight.

같은 채널의 다른 글

슬라이드 20장40:44EN
3Blue1Brown· 2026년 10월 16일Grant Sanderson: There's never been a better time to go into mathGrant Sanderson, Constantin Kogler · 3Blue1BrownStudents fear AI has solved mathematics. Grant Sanderson argues the opposite: even if machines prove theorems better than we do, the institution of math stays valuable—and this is a rare moment when newcomers can reshape it.MathematicsAI for scienceHuman-AI Collaboration+2
슬라이드 29장51:55EN
3Blue1Brown· 2026년 9월 18일The last IMO problem AI could not solveGrant Sanderson · 3Blue1BrownGrant Sanderson walks through IMO 2025 Problem 6 — a tiling puzzle that frontier models missed — and the visual patience it takes to prove a construction is optimal.MathematicsAI researchReasoning & test-time compute+2
0:55EN
3Blue1Brown· 2026년 7월 24일The 64 Sugar Cubes Puzzle: Six Equal DistancesA 4×4×4 block has three colors; prove that six same-colored pairs share a distance.MathematicsEducation
33:51EN
3Blue1Brown· 2026년 7월 16일What Cross-Entropy Connects: Compression, Language Models and KL DivergenceGrant Sanderson · 3Blue1BrownGrant Sanderson builds cross-entropy from code lengths and uses it to explain next-token training and distillation.MathematicsMachine LearningFoundation Models+1
슬라이드2:25EN
3Blue1Brown· 2026년 6월 12일How Shannon Measured the Entropy of EnglishA guessing game helped Claude Shannon estimate how much information English text contains, and why prediction is central to compression.MathematicsAI History
슬라이드1:02EN
3Blue1Brown· 2026년 6월 10일A Robot Walk and the Puzzle of Optimal Binary EncodingHow few bits does it take to send directions that occur with unequal frequencies?MathematicsScience Communication