If we regard a given Sudoku grid as a Latin Square, all UA4's on the grid are obviously LIC's. But the converse is not always true. Our Sudoku grid might have an LIC on the corner cells, (r1,c1) = (r9,c9) and (r1,c9) = (r9,c1), but that can't be a UA4 as the cells are in 4 different boxes.
Of course, the idea of a UA is applicable to Latin Squares, and all LIC's on a Sudoku grid are unavoidable sets (of size 4) on the Latin Square, but the term "unavoidable" appears to mean something different in the published literature. For example, in this short paper, which is a gentle introduction to critical sets (which we could call minimal puzzles), the concept of UA's is implied, but is not given a name.
Anyway, my interest was sparked here by a reference in the LCT project thread to this example of a grid with 36 UA4's:
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It has some interesting properties. The UA4's cover all 81 cells, the grid has 36 automorphisms, and MCN = 15.
It also has exactly 36 intercalates.
I thought that this was worth some further investigation, and began by counting the LIC's and UA4's for every ED grid in the catalog. I also separately counted them for the 560,151 NTA grids (grids with non-trivial automorphisms). Finally I added the LIC counts for a large sample of random Latin Squares.
This confirmed that:
- 36 UA4's is absolutely the maximum possible
- there are 9 ED grids that have 36 UA4's
It also turned up other interesting items, which I will come to in due course. The full table of results is given below, it shows for each N = 0, 1, 2 ... the number of grids in the set that were found to have exactly N LIC's and UA4's.
A summary:
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GPLS: (gen pop = random Latin squares)
NG: 5474615294 (sample)
Avg: 17.8755 LIC's / grid
Max # of LIC = 62 (observed)
ED: Sudoku catalog
NG: 5472730538
Avg: 19.6259 LIC's / grid
11.5788 UA4's / grid
Max # of LIC = 72, max # of UA4 = 36
NTA: (automorphic grids)
NG: 560151
Avg: 18.6205 LIC's / grid
9.5769 UA4's / grid
Max # of LIC = 72, max # of UA4 = 36
LIC v UA4 distribution: Show