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A386400 Minimum volume of n polycubes such that each polycube is adjacent to every other polycube.

Original entry on oeis.org

1, 2, 4, 7, 13, 20, 28, 36
Offset: 1

Author

David Hathaway, Jul 20 2025

Keywords

Comments

Two polycubes are adjacent if there is at least one cell in the first polycube and at least one cell in the second polycube that are aligned such that they can be joined face to face (i.e., a third polycube can be made with those two cells).
Volume in measured by the total number of cells.
Equivalently, a(n) is the least number of vertices in a subgraph of the 3-dimensional grid that has Hadwiger number n. - Pontus von Brömssen, Jul 31 2025

Examples

			a(n) can be seen by the following diagrams, where each cell in the i-th polycube is labeled by [i].
a(1)=1:
 [1]
a(2)=2:
 [1][2]
a(3)=4:
 [1][3]
 [2][3]
a(4)=7:
 Layer 1  Layer 2
 [1][3]   [4][4]
 [2][3]   [2]
a(5)=13:
 Layer 1    Layer 2
 [5][1][3]  [4][4][4]
 [5][2][3]     [2]
 [5][3][3]
		

Crossrefs

Cf. A193416.

Formula

a(n) <= n^2-n-6, for n>4
This upper bound comes from the following construction which holds for all n>4:
Layer 1 Layer 2
[1][1]... [1] [1] [1] [1] [n]
[1][4]...[n-3][n-2][n-1] [2][2]... [2] [2] [2] [n]
[3][4]...[n-3][n-2][n-1] [3][3]... [3] [3] [3] [n]
[4]...[n-3][n-2][n-1] [4]... [4] [4] [4] [n]
... : : : ... : : : :
[n-3][n-2][n-1] [n-3][n-3][n-3][n]
[n-2][n-1] [n-2] [n] [n]