Enumeration of n-Dimensional Hypercubes, Icosahedra, Rubik’s Cube Dice, Colorings, Chirality, and Encryptions Based on Their Symmetries

Abstract

The whimsical Las Vegas/Monte Carlo cubic dice are generalized to construct the combinatorial problem of enumerating all n-dimensional hypercube dice and dice of other shapes that exhibit cubic, icosahedral, and higher symmetries. By utilizing powerful generating function techniques for various irreducible representations, we derive the combinatorial enumerations of all possible dice in n-dimensional space with hyperoctahedral symmetries. Likewise, a number of shapes that exhibit icosahedral symmetries such as a truncated dodecahedron and a truncated icosahedron are considered for the combinatorial problem of dice enumerations with the corresponding shapes. We consider several dice with cubic symmetries such as the truncated octahedron, dodecahedron, and Rubik’s cube shapes. It is shown that all enumerated dice are chiral, and we provide the counts of chiral pairs of dice in the n-dimensional space. During the combinatorial enumeration, it was discovered that two different shapes of dice exist with the same chiral pair count culminating to the novel concept of isochiral polyhedra. The combinatorial problem of dice enumeration is generalized to multi-coloring partitions. Applications to chirality in n-dimension, molecular clusters, zeolites, mesoporous materials, cryptography, and biology are also pointed out. Applications to the nonlinear n-dimensional hypercube and other dicey encryptions are exemplified with romantic, clandestine messages: “I love U” and “V Elope at 2”.