Richardson's theorem

Okay kiddo, I’ll try to explain Richardson’s theorem to you in a way that you can understand!

Imagine that you have a really big puzzle with lots and lots of pieces. Now let’s say that you want to color each piece either red or blue, but you want to make sure that no two pieces that touch each other have the same color.

It might seem easy at first, but as you start to add more and more pieces to the puzzle, it gets really complicated! In fact, it turns out that it’s really hard to figure out if it’s even possible to color the puzzle without breaking the rule about touching pieces having the same color.

That’s where Richardson’s theorem comes in! It’s a really cool mathematical theorem that says that there’s no easy way to figure out if a puzzle like this can be colored without any touching pieces having the same color. In fact, the theorem proves that it’s what we call “NP-hard,” which means that even computers would have a really hard time figuring it out!

So, in summary, Richardson’s theorem is a really fancy way of saying that it’s really hard to figure out if a puzzle can be colored without breaking a certain rule, even if you use a computer to help you. Pretty cool, huh?