Resumen:

The Icosian game was invented by Sir William Rowan Hamilton, and it is credited as one of the historical sources of graph theory. However, the game was a commercial flop. We ask: did Sir William lack the mathematical sensibility to propose an interesting mathematical game?

We consider some variations of Hamilton's game, which are deeply related to the Lovasz-Plummer Conjecture, nanotubes and automata. We conclude that Hamilton appropriately based his game on a NP-hard problem, but perhaps he lacked the suitable nanotechnology to develop the right version of its puzzle.