How many different Tsuro tiles can exist?

You can use Burnside's Lemma. I'll go through the calculation here, though you should read that page for this to make sense.

The set X is all 105 possibilities. The group G that acts on X is $\langle r | r^4 = 1 \rangle$, where r is a 90 degree rotation. Burnside's Lemma is applicable since each tile corresponds exactly to one orbit in X under G. The number of elements of X fixed by each element of G is

  • $1: 105$
  • $r: 5$
  • $r^2: 25$
  • $r^3: 5$

So the number of orbits (tiles) is $\frac{1}{4}(105+5+25+5)=35$. The hardest part is computing the $r^2: 25$ entry; here's how I did it:

  • Case 1: No pair of antipodal points is connected. Choose any point: you have 6 legal possibilities to connect. Whatever you choose, $r^2$ fixes a second symmetrical connection, so you have 4 points left with 2 legal ways to connect them, for a total of 6*2=12 possibilities.
  • Case 2: 2 pairs of antipodal points are connected. There are $\binom{4}{2}=6$ ways to pick the pairs and 2 ways to connect the reamining 4 points, for another 12 possibilities.
  • Case 3: All 4 antipodal pairs are connected. There is only 1 such possibility.

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Combinations