FIVE ROOMS

This old popular puzzle, called

Five Room House puzzle (also
known as Walls and Lines
puzzle, or Cross the Network
puzzle), is canonically
represented as a rectangular
diagram divided into five rooms,
as shown opposite. The object of
the puzzle is to draw a continuous
path through the walls of all 5
rooms, without going through any
wall twice, and without crossing
any path. The path can, of course,
end in any room, not necessarily in
the room from where it started.
Some puzzle diagrams represent
the rooms with openings supposed
to be doors. In this instance, the
challenge is to visit every room of
the apartment by walking through
every door exactly once.
Requirements for solvability
Whether starting and ending in
the same room, or starting in
one room and ending in another
one, every other room of the
diagram/apartment must have
an even number of doors... That
is, pair(s) of in and out
doors (as doors CANNOT be
used TWICE, we have then to
use an even number of doors as
we ENTER and LEAVE those
rooms).

5 room puzzle variants

diagram with 16 openings/doors

Lets suppose we start in a room

with an odd number of doors,
then it is possible to visit all the
5 rooms of the apartment if and
ONLY if another room has an odd
3D rendering of the puzzle
number of doors -representing
the departure and the arrival
points of the continuous
path - , and all the other rooms have an even number of doors. In a few
words, for this topological puzzle to be solvable, there may NOT be more than
TWO rooms with an odd number of doors. Since the puzzle has THREE rooms

with an odd number of openings/doors, it is mathematically impossible to

complete a circuit crossing.
Analogously, a continuous line that enters and leaves one of the rooms crosses
two walls. Since the THREE contiguous larger rooms each have an odd number
of walls to be crossed, it follows that an END of a line must be inside each of
them if all the 16 walls are crossed. But a unicursal line has only TWO
ends,this contradiction makes the 5 Room House puzzle unsolvable.
However, if we close a door or add an extra room to the puzzle (see
fig. a andb below), then it becomes solvable. Now, you can easily draw one
continuous line that passes through every opening exactly once... Try it! (the
five-room variant on the left (fig. a) is just a little harder to solve, because you
have to figure out where to start)

The Five
Room
House is
actually a
classic
example
of an impossible puzzle one that bears no positive solution. In this particular
case, the solution consists in finding that the problem has no solution!
(remember: puzzles always have one, several or no solutions)
Graph theory

The insolubility of
the 5 Room
House problem
can be proved
using a graph
theory approach,
with each room
being
a vertexand each
wall being
an edge of the
graph (see image
opposite). In
fact, this puzzle is similar to the famous seven bridges of Knigsberg problem
thanks to which the eminent Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler laid the
foundations of graph theory.
Euler wondered whether there was a way of traversing each of the 7 bridges
over the river Pregel at Knigsberg (now Kaliningrad) once and only once,
starting and returning at the same point in the town. He finally realized that
the problem had no solutions!

Tricks to 'solve' the puzzle

As you experienced, this puzzle is impossible to solve on paper... But
impossible puzzles sometimes have out-of-the-box solutions, as the nonstandard solution depicted below.

Another neat
out-of-the box
solution...
Everything down
to this point has
been in 2
dimensions,
either a diagram
drawn on paper,
or a five room
apartment on a
flat surface. In
order to draw a
continuous path
that goes from one room to another without crossing a line or going through a
door twice, you have to reproduce the 5 room house puzzle onto a surface that
is not topologically equivalent to a sheet of paper. The solid that may help you
is a torus, a kind of ring-shaped solid resembling a doughnut or a bagel. The
puzzle diagram should be reproduced so that the hole of the torus is inside one
of the 3 larger rooms, as shown in the example below.