I've had a long standing attraction to the Rubik's Snake puzzle for many years, including being involved with glSnake. (Scroll to the red bit for final answer)
One question of interest was how many unique configurations of the Snake are possible. The Snake consists of 24 interconnecting prisms, with each interconnect able to be in one of four possible positions. This leads to a trivial upper bound of 423 = 70,368,744,177,664 distinct combinations. But many of these are not actually possible, as they may be configurations where the snake impossibly passes through itself. And most configurations will appear twice as mirror images.
A trivial lower bound can be reached by starting with a straight snake and then only permuting every other junction. Every rotation will be along a parallel axis, giving rise to pairs of interconnects that are always on discrete planes: meaning that the snake can never bend back on itself. Halving guarantees no reflections. (Symmetrical would only be counted once, but this is a lower-bound). This gives 411/2 = 2,097,152 as a trivial lower bound.
As an enhanced lower bound, we could observe that the snake prisms exits on a 3-dimensional grid of cubes. At any time the next piece could lie in the adjacent voxel in either the x, y or z direction (but can never follow the same axis twice). If we restrict ourselves to only ever advancing in the positive direction on each axis, then we always have a choice of one of (+y or +z) or (+x or +z) or (+x or +y), depending on whether our previous move was +x, +y, or +z respectively. In any case we have 2 choices. This gives us 223, which is not any better than before. However we can extend the idea: if we partition the space into planes normal to the x axis, then any time we extend in the +x direction, without loss of generality we can start moving in in any of the four +/-y or +/-z, i.e. four choices. From there we can move +x again, or either +/- along the axis we didn't previously chose. I.e. 3 choices. In this way we never fold back to previous planes. From that point on we only have 2 choices: to continue moving in a straight diagonal, or move onto the next x plane. We can represent this as the following Markovian chain:
That's about as far as I could get without using numerical methods. (I also had a complicated, slightly improved, upper bound). So I wrote a program to walk every possible combination, which back tracks whenever it found a collision. Written as a single-threaded service to run in the background this took about five months to execute. This gave the following answer:
13,535,886,319,159 = approx 421.81 combinations, including possible mirror image duplicates.
To handle mirror images, each time it encounters a complete snake it then converts it to a normalized form as follows. The snake is represented as a string of 23 numbers (from 0 to 3). The string is then reversed. The two strings are compared lexicographically and the smaller is the normal form. If the string matches the normal form, then it is counted, otherwise it is skipped. This way potential reflections that appear twice can be counted once, but symmetrical snakes also get counted once. Note that I'm interpreting mirror images here as applying the same turns from either end, not if the volume produced is a mirror image. For example, I'm counting a left-handed corkscrew snake and a right-handed corkscrew snake as discrete. But if you just twist one piece 180 degrees at the start or the end of the snake, then I count that as the same snake.
When ignoring reflections like this, the exhaustive search gives this result. Total number of possible snake configurations that don't overlap, and ignoring mirror repeats:
Final Answer = 6,770,518,220,623 = approx 421.31
Behold. OK, it only took another two years to getting around to writing this up any telling the world. (mainly because I started writing up a detailed paper on the method, which quickly got boring). Hopefully anyone else who has tried this got the same answer.
So table of numbers:
|Trivial lower bound||2,097,152||410.5|
|Refined lower bound||85,149,351,936||418.15|
|Exhaustive with duplicates||13,535,886,319,159||421.81|
|Refined upper bound||30,002,572,532,736||422.60|
|Trivial upper bound||70,368,744,177,664||423.00|
Along the way I also discovered that there are about 64,546,391 (approx 412.97 unique cyclic paths where the head and tail of the snake connect.
Also, only a relatively small number of snakes are symmetrical.
I should probably go and get some sun, or social interaction, or something now.