The following is the result of an CURM sponsored undergraduate research project conducted by Dr. Allison Henrich, Alexandra Ionescu, Brooke Mathews, Isaac Ortega, and Kelemua Tesfaye in the 2019-20 academic year.

When we began our research we thought we were going to work on pure math research (you know, making conjectures, proving theorems, and such). Our work was meant to involve the study of knot mosaics. Knot mosaics were first introduced by Lomonaco and Kauffman in 2008 [LomKau] in order to build a quantum knot system. But these interesting objects attracted a lot of interest in the math community, not necessarily because of their applications in quantum knot theory, but because they’re interesting combinatorial objects to play with and ask questions about.

In trying to formulate some new questions about knot mosaics and consider strategies for finding their answers, our team took some time to play. We were able to get our hands on a big bag of woodcut mosaic tiles made by Lew Ludwig for the UnKnot Conference, and we made some of our own. So, for several weeks in the fall, we would spend a part of our research time physically playing with these tiles to build intuition and formulate questions. One day, as we were talking about some potential research questions and playing idly with our tiles—trying to make collections of tiles be suitably connected—we realized that this simple act was actually pretty fun. “If we think putting together tiles in a suitably connected way is fun, maybe others would too!” “What if we created a game—kind of like Tetris—that used knot mosaic tiles instead of tetrominoes?” [TETRIS] And that was how our project was born. We dabbled in our pure math research and associated programming projects for several weeks after this idea came about, but quickly, it became clear to us that working to develop Knotris should be our new goal.

The game was developed using the Godot Game Engine.

All audio and music provided by the very talented Nyall "DnYaLL" Padre.

DMS-1722563

References:

[LomKau] Lomonaco, Samuel J., and Louis H. Kauffman. “Quantum knots and mosaics.” Quantum Information Processing 7, no. 2-3 (2008): 85-115.

[TETRIS] Tetris, Inc. http://www.tetris.com.

StatusIn development
PlatformsWindows, macOS, Linux, HTML5
Rating
Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorIzook
GenrePuzzle
Made withGodot
Tagsknot-theory, Math
Code licenseMIT License
Average sessionA few seconds
LanguagesEnglish
LinksSource code

Download

Download
Knotris.exe 49 MB
Version 18 Jan 03, 2021
Download
knotris-mac.zip 30 MB
Version 14 Jan 03, 2021
Download
Knotris.x86_64 55 MB
Version 13 Jan 03, 2021

Comments

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(+1)

Knotris is hard! Which perfectly makes sense because knots are tough cookie in math from what i'm told, neat subject though. Anywho the graphics are good and game play isn't explained too well but once you figure it out it's a fun but hard puzzle! I could so see some folks really getting into this game, like imagine a top level tetris playing trying to play this and make loops oml that'd be amazing. I will say on the website version i couldn't hear any music which is a darn shame. over all super cool what y'all did!

(1 edit) (+1)

Wow! Thank you for playing so soon after I pushed this, and thank you for the feedback! Yeah I agree that we could totally explain the mechanics a lot better,  I'd really like to write some sort of tutorial for new players.  Maybe we'll add that soon....

(1 edit) (+1)

that'd be super cool if it could get some more work. once i figured it out i got a score of 5400 10,000.  The concept itself isn't bad and you executed the game play well, it's a solid game.