Jeu de taquin

Jeu de taquin is a construction in the mathematical field of combinatorics, introduced by Marcel-Paul Schützenberger in 1977, that defines an equivalence relation on skew standard Young tableaux. The basic move, called a jeu de taquin slide, rearranges the numbers inside a tableau in a manner similar to how tiles are shuffled around in the fifteen puzzle, filling an empty cell by sliding an adjacent number into it and opening a new empty cell elsewhere. Two tableaux are considered jeu de taquin equivalent when one can be reached from the other through a sequence of these slides. The name itself, French for teasing game, is also the French name for the fifteen puzzle, reflecting the direct resemblance between the tableau rearranging move and the sliding tile puzzle that inspired it.