This is a great rhombicosidodecahedron :
Great Rhombicosidodecahedron
If the faces are non-conducting, and each of the edges has a resistance of 1 0 0 Ω , what is the highest effective resistance (in ohms) you can obtain between any two vertices?
Round your answer to the nearest integer if necessary.
Image credit: commons.wikimedia.org
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This Mathworld page refers to a paper by Babic et al, which gives an explicit formula for all the effective resistances of a connected graph. The Mathworld page then helpfully gives all the resistances for the Platonic and Archimedean solids! For the great rhombicosidodecahedron, the largest possible resistance is 1 0 0 × 2 6 7 5 1 4 3 8 0 5 4 2 4 6 6 0 5 0 = 1 0 0 × 2 1 1 1 4 4 2 8 1 5 ≈ 2 0 3
Really? We have to solve 118 linear equations? This problem should be a Level 8 problem then...
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Yeah... Not one of my more elegant solutions... :/
Was hoping someone might post a much more clever solution taking advantage of all the symmetry that this solid has...
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How did you solve these 118 equations in the first place?
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@Pi Han Goh – Of course, I didn't solve these by hand... Are you, like, a crazy person? ;-)
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The compute intensive, but somewhat uninteresting solution, of course, is the brute force method of picking two opposite vertices A and Z, applying a voltage of 1V to A, and grounding Z, (Note, this doesn't imply we only have 26, vertices, you'll need to come up with creative names for the other 94 nodes :) ) and solving Kirchoff's equations at each of the other 118 nodes.
I have labeled a few nodes here for reference here:
This gives you the following set of 118 linear equations:
⋮
etc.
where V n = The voltage on node n
Finally, once we solve the above set of linear equations, we end up with 118 voltages. Lets consider the three on the nodes next to Z and call them W, X, and Y.
The current from A to Z is the sum of the currents from W to Z, X to Z, and Y to Z, which will be V W / 1 0 0 , V X / 1 0 0 and V Y / 1 0 0 (since we have 100 ohm resistors on all edges).
So, R e q = 1 0 0 ∗ ( V W + V X + V Y )
Once you solve the above set of linear equations, you get:
V W + V X + V Y = 4 2 8 1 5 / 2 1 1 1 4 ≈ 2 . 0 3
So, R e q = 2 0 3 .
As I said, not pretty, but it gets the job done...
If anyone has a more elegant way, I'd love to see it! :-)