Applications
Pre-dating Room's paper, Room squares had been used by the directors of duplicate bridge tournaments in the construction of the tournaments. In this application they are known as Howell rotations. The columns of the square represent tables, each of which holds a deal of the cards that is played by each pair of teams that meet at that table. The rows of the square represent rounds of the tournament, and the numbers within the cells of the square represent the teams that are scheduled to play each other at the table and round represented by that cell.
Archbold and Johnson used Room squares to construct experimental designs.
There are connections between Room squares and other mathematical objects such as quasigroups, Latin squares, graph factorizations, and Steiner triple systems amongst others.
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