Counting (and Randomly Generating) Hamiltonian Cycles in Rectangular Grids

Abstract

We first fully implement, in Maple, the ingenious method of Robert Stoyan and Volker Strehl from 1995 to automatically derive generating functions for the number of Hamiltonian cycles in an m by n grid graph ,for a fixed width m, but general length n, and actually compute these generating functions for all m up to ten. We also show how to generate a uniformly-at-random such Hamiltonian cycle, and also derive more informative generating functions for other parameters besides the length of the grid graph.