The friends-and-strangers graph of simple graphs
and
on
vertices is the graph whose vertices
are all bijections
. Two such bijections
and
are adjacent when
for an edge
of
such that
is an edge of
. Thus
has
vertices, and its edges
represent friendly swaps (Defant and Kravitz 2021).
Equivalently, the vertices of are positions, the vertices of
are people, and edges of
indicate friendship. A move swaps two friends occupying adjacent positions. This interpretation includes
sliding puzzles: the 15 puzzle is represented by taking
to be the
grid graph and
to be the star graph whose center
represents the empty cell. Inversion of bijections
gives the graph isomorphism
.
Krishnan and Li (2026) proved that, for connected
and
,
the vertex connectivity of
equals its minimum
vertex degree. They also proved that the vertex
connectivity of each connected component
of
equals its minimum vertex degree.