Siteswap state diagrams

Hans Lundmark (halun@mai.liu.se)

October 4, 2004

This document contains diagrams that can be used for quickly finding valid siteswap juggling patterns
and transitions between different such patterns. These diagrams contain all possible siteswaps for
juggling with 3, 4, or 5 balls using throws of height at most 7.
www.juggling.org/help/siteswap/ is recommended reading if you are not familiar with siteswap
notation.

How to use
Decide how many balls you want to juggle and the highest throws you want to use, and find the
corresponding diagram.
The arrows are important. Each arrow is labeled by a digit which represents a throw, or by a string
of digits which represents a sequence of throws.
The numbers in the boxes are less important. They represent so-called juggling states, and the
numbering is explained in the technical notes below. The state with the lowest number in each
diagram is called the ground state and the others are called excited states.

Note:

A m

x
y
z

- B

is drawn as

x,y

in order to save space.

Any closed loop corresponds to a valid siteswap pattern, and vice versa. In other words:
pick an initial state, then start walking around the diagram from there, following an arrow of your
choice from one state to the next. For each step, remember the digit(s) on that arrow. When you
return to the state where you started, the sequence of digits so obtained constitutes a valid siteswap.
(And every valid siteswap with throws up to the chosen height can be found in this way.)

Examples
In these examples, I will use the diagram for 3 balls, up to height 5. This is already enough for
most well-known 3 ball tricks. The illustration below shows where the siteswaps 3, 441, and 531 can
be found in the diagram.


7




11

13

11



\88
88
8

53
18

/ 13

11

Siteswap 441

Siteswap 3 (cascade)

V

13

Siteswap 531

These three siteswaps all begin and end in the same state (namely the ground state 7). This means
that they can be combined freely: 3 3 441 3 531 441, for example, is a valid siteswap.
The shower, on the other hand, starts and ends in an excited state, so one cant go immediately from
a ground state pattern (like the cascade) to the shower; throwing 3 51 will cause two balls to land
simultaneously in one hand. Some extra throws must be inserted as a transition between the two
patterns, for example 3 4 51 or 3 52 51. As can be seen in the state diagram, there are four such
transitions from the ground state 7 to the shower state 11 using throws no higher than 5:

4,52

13

Siteswap 51 (shower)

8
88
88
8

53,551






51


11

11

13

Transitions: 4 or 52. . .

11 o

50

13

. . . or 5350 or 55150

Inserting one cycle of the shower at the point where the siteswap 441 passes through state 11 produces
the siteswap 4 51 4 1:




 
11

51



\88
88
8
18

8
/ 13

Siteswap 45141

The nice-looking number 12345 also happens to be a siteswap. When juggling this, it is better to think
of it as 3 4 51 2 since that is a ground state pattern:


E

4
51

 
11

13
Siteswap 34512

Here are two ways of juggling 3 balls out of a 5 ball shower:

55500


7

11

11 l

13
Three ball flash

550
50

The snake

13

Technical notes
These diagrams cover only standard siteswap juggling (asynchronous, no multiplex).
Juggling states are usually thought of as binary numbers with as many ones as the number of balls
being juggled; a one at the kth position from the right means that a previously thrown ball will be
landing k time units from now, a zero means no ball. In the diagrams, the states are labeled by the
decimal and binary representations of that number.
The usual way of drawing state diagrams is to have each arrow denote only a single throw. However,
the diagrams here are reduced in the sense that states having only one arrow coming in or only one
arrow going out have been removed and replaced by extra (multi-throw) arrows. This leaves only the
interesting states where
there is
a true crossroads of choices, and reduces the total number of states
d2
in the diagram from nd to n1
, where n is the number of balls and d is the maximum height:

height 2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

1
3
6
10
15
21

1
4
10
20
35

1
5
15
35

1
6
21

1
7

balls

Number of states required in a reduced state diagram.

I discovered this simplification on my own, but later I found a paper on logic and juggling by Steven de
Rooij1 from 2001, where the possibility of making this kind of reduction was pointed out in a footnote.
I also suspect that graph theorists have thought of similar things in non-juggling contexts long before
that. So I dont claim to be the first one with this idea, although I might be the first one to really
exploit it for juggling purposes.
This document was produced using the LATEX typesetting program with the XY-pic package. I wrote a
Python program which generated XY-pic code for all the arrows and labels in the diagrams. The layout
was then manually fine-tuned to avoid collisions. The first version saw the light of day on January 14,
2003.

1 See

homepages.cwi.nl/~rooij/.

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