ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Morphy Number

Imagine you have a box filled with different colored balls. Some balls are red, some are blue, and some are green. Morphy number is like a game, where you pick two balls from the box and try to see if one ball can be transformed into the other ball by changing the color of just one or two of its sections.

For example, let's say you picked a red ball and a blue ball. The red ball has three sections - head, body, and legs. The blue ball also has three sections - head, arms, and legs. Can you transform the red ball into the blue ball by changing the color of just one or two sections? Yes, you can! You can change the color of the red ball's body section to blue, and now you have a blue ball like the one you picked.

The Morphy number is the minimum number of transformations needed to change one ball into the other. In the example above, the Morphy number is 1 because you only needed to change the color of one section to get from the red ball to the blue ball.

So, when people talk about the Morphy number, they are usually talking about a specific type of puzzle or game that involves transforming one thing into another. It's kind of like a fun way to test your problem-solving skills, and to see if you can find the shortest path between two different variations of the same thing.