More ties than we thought

TL;DR

This paper extends the enumeration of neck tie-knots to include textured front knots tied with the narrow end, showing the language describing these knots is context free and enumerating over 266,000 distinct knots.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, context-free language for describing extended tie-knots, including those with textured fronts, and provides extensive enumeration of these knots.

Findings

Enumerated 266,682 distinct tie-knots

Identified a regular sub-language covering original knots

Extended enumeration to textured front tie-knots

Abstract

We extend the existing enumeration of neck tie-knots to include tie-knots with a textured front, tied with the narrow end of a tie. These tie-knots have gained popularity in recent years, based on reconstructions of a costume detail from The Matrix Reloaded, and are explicitly ruled out in the enumeration by Fink and Mao (2000). We show that the relaxed tie-knot description language that comprehensively describes these extended tie-knot classes is context free. It has a regular sub-language that covers all the knots that originally inspired the work. From the full language, we enumerate 266 682 distinct tie-knots that seem tie-able with a normal neck-tie. Out of these 266 682, we also enumerate 24 882 tie-knots that belong to the regular sub-language.