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Hexagonal Grid


HexagonalGrid

A hexagonal grid is a grid formed by a tessellation of regular hexagons. Boards made of hexagonal grids are often found in strategy and role-playing games. This is useful because, in contrast to square grid and triangular grid boards, no two hexagonal cells meet only at a single point; touching cells share a common side.

In tiling and board contexts, the hexagonal grid may also be called a hexagonal lattice. However, in point lattice and packing contexts, that term usually denotes the triangular lattice.

The graph formed by the corners and sides of the hexagonal cells admits a brick-wall representation.

HexagonalGridArithmeticLabels

Consider a hexagon of cells consisting of one central cell and r surrounding rings, where r is a nonnegative integer. It contains N=3r^2+3r+1 cells. These cells can be labeled bijectively by the integers 0, 1, ..., N-1 so that the labels along each straight line of adjacent cells form an arithmetic progression modulo N (Chang et al. 1995). This condition differs from the equal line sums required for a magic hexagon. For r=2, assign each cell a pair (q,s) satisfying |q|,|s|,|q+s|<=2. The illustrated label is the residue of -2q+3s modulo 19, so a step in each of the three grid directions changes the label by a fixed residue.


See also

Brick-Wall Representation, Clean Tile Problem, Grid, Hexagon, Hexagon Tiling, Hexagonal Grid Graph, Hexagonal Lattice, Square Grid, Tessellation, Triangular Grid

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References

Chang, G. J.; Hwang, F. K.; Wright, P. E.; and Griggs, J. R. "A Unique Arithmetic Labeling of Hexagonal Lattices." J. Combin. Designs 3, 169-177, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcd.3180030303.

Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha

Hexagonal Grid

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Hexagonal Grid." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/HexagonalGrid.html

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