Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2013
We consider a local move on a knot diagram, where we denote the local move by λ. If two knots K1 and K2 are transformed into each other by a finite sequence of λ-moves, the λ-distance between K1 and K2 is the minimum number of times of λ-moves needed to transform K1 into K2. A λ-distance satisfies the axioms of distance. A two dimensional lattice of knots by λ-moves is the two dimensional lattice graph which satisfies the following: the vertex set consists of oriented knots and for any two vertices K1 and K2, the distance on the graph from K1 to K2 coincides with the λ-distance between K1 and K2, where the distance on the graph means the number of edges of the shortest path which connects the two knots. Local moves called Cn-moves are closely related to Vassiliev invariants. In this paper, we show that for any given knot K, there is a two dimensional lattice of knots by C2m-moves with the vertex K.