Polycubes

Geometry Level 4

Polyonimoes are shapes made from squares. The pieces of the game Tetris are tetronimoes, each made from four squares. There seven possible tetronimos, shown below. Observe the green S and red Z tetronimos are mirror images.

Now, consider polyonimoes, solids built from cubes. Here's one built from five cubes:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/AGK-pentacube.png/240px-AGK-pentacube.png

Tetracubes are made from four cubes. How many possible tetracubes are there? Be careful to count mirror images separately.


The answer is 8.

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2 solutions

Matthew Imhoff
Apr 3, 2014

The seven tetronimoes shown in the figure can form five tetracubes, which have their cubes in the same plane. The S tetracube can be rotated in 3D to form the Z tetracube, and similarly the L and Γ tetracubes are equivalent.

The non-planar tetracubes can be generated with a base of three cubes in an L shape, and then placing the fourth cube on top of one of the cubes of this base. This gives three distinct tetracubes. Like the S and Z tetronimoes, two of these are mirror images that are not rotations of each other.

So how many?

Matheus Camargo - 7 years, 2 months ago

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It gives a total of 5+3 = 8

Tara Liu - 7 years, 2 months ago
Finn Hulse
Apr 7, 2014

Remember that there are already six established ways to arrange them that lie flat on the ground. There are only two other ways to stack them, thus 2 + 6 = 8 2+6=\boxed{8} .

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