There are 24*60 minutes in a day (ignoring the imperfections of the natural world, the Earth and Sun). So there are 24*60 valid 24 hour times (excluding seconds) on a digital clock.
Each of these can be rotated 4 ways, by 0,1,2 or 3 places. For example :
- 12:34
- 23:41
- 34:12
- 41:23
In which case only 1 and 2 are valid 24 hour times.
How many of these 4*24*60 rotations are also valid minutes? (What is the fastest way to find this out?)
Also, what is the minimum generating set for all 24*60 valid 24 hours times. So can I find the minimal set of Lyndon words (the earliest 24 hour times) that generate all 24 hours times? How many of these minutes are there? So out of 24*60 minutes in a day, 1 day is actually just generated by x of these significant minutes.
(This is not a homework question)
The easier part is the rotation by two digits: This yields a valid time iff the minutes are less than 24, which happens in 242=576
cases.
If we rotate by one to the right, the ones of the minutes become the tens of the hours, so they must be between 0
and 2, which is the case in 18 out of 60 minutes. The ones of the hours become the tens of the minutes, so they must be between 0 and 5, which is the case in 16 out of 24 hours. Thus the number of valid rotations is 18⋅16=288
.
If we rotate by one to the left, the number of valid rotations must be the same as if we rotate by one to the right, so that makes another 288
valid rotations. Obviously if we don’t rotate at all, all 24⋅60=1440 times are valid, so the total is 1440+576+288+288=2592 valid rotations out of 4⋅24⋅60=5760
, slightly less than half.
Counting the size of a minimum generating set would be rather cumbersome by hand; at least I don’t see an easy way to do it. That sort of thing is better left to our electronic friends – here’s code that checks the above result and finds that a minimal generating set contains 999
times. I wonder whether that’s a coincidence…