A201126 Maximum water retention of a magic square of order n.

0, 15, 69, 192, 418, 797, 1408

Offset

3,2

Comments

Determining the maximum water retention of a magic square has been the subject of the spring 2010 round of "Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests". The following description was given by Al Zimmermann: The scoring function is defined in terms of the physical characteristics of water. Simply stated, pour a gazillion units of water on top of a magic square and measure the water that doesn't run off. The cells in the magic square have heights given by their values and water cannot pass between two cells joined at a vertical edge.

Lower bounds for the next terms are a(10) >= 2267, a(11) >= 3492, a(12) >= 5185, a(13) >= 7445, a(14) >= 10397, a(15) >= 14154.

This water retention model progressed from the specific case of the magic square to a more generalized system of random levels. A quite interesting counter-intuitive finding that a random two-level system will retain more water than a random three-level system when the size of the square is greater than 51 X 51 was discovered. This was reported in the Physical Review Letters in 2012 and referenced in the Nature article in 2018. - Craig Knecht, Dec 01 2018

Links

Table of n, a(n) for n=3..9.

B. Burger, J. S. Andrade Jr. & H. J. Herrmann, A Comparison of Hydrological and Topological Water Sheds, Nature, 10586, 2018.

Harvey Heinz, Knecht Topographical squares, Summary of contest results.

Craig Knecht, Magic Square - Topographical model

Craig L. Knecht, Walter Trump, Daniel ben-Avraham, and Robert M. Ziff, Retention Capacity of Random Surfaces, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 045703, 2012.

Craig Knecht, Pattern comparison table.

Hugo Pfoertner, 4 X 4 Magic square retaining 15 units of water

Hugo Pfoertner, 5 X 5 Magic square retaining 69 units of water

Hugo Pfoertner, 6 X 6 Magic square retaining 192 units of water

Hugo Pfoertner, 7 X 7 Magic square retaining 418 units of water

Hugo Pfoertner, 8 X 8 Magic square retaining 797 units of water

Hugo Pfoertner, 9 X 9 Magic square retaining 1408 units of water

Wikipedia, Water retention on mathematical surfaces

Example

See links for illustrations.

Crossrefs

Cf. A201127 (water retention of semi-magic squares), A261347 (water retention of number squares), A261798 (water retention of an associative magic square).

Sequence in context: A336624 A211917 A015876 * A085474 A212109 A124893

Adjacent sequences: A201123 A201124 A201125 * A201127 A201128 A201129

Keyword

nonn,hard,nice,more

Author

Hugo Pfoertner, Dec 03 2011

Status

approved