Friday, October 24, 2008

Algorithm for Tiling a Plane

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Abstract:  Tiling of the plane is a collection of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. is a partition of an infinite space (usually Euclidean) into pieces having a finite number of distinct shape. The problem of deciding whether an infinite plane can be tiled
with translates of a given polyomino has been un-decidable. There is no final algorithm ( atleast none known).This report shows my attempt to find suchalgorithm.INTRODUCTION
Tilings, have puzzled lots of people from ancient times up to now; and even now, despite of the efforts of many mathematicians these objects remains mysterious. The systematic study of the theory of tilings started in the nineteenth century, largely motivated by many physical
experiments and theories about the structure of solid matter. According to [3] a tiling T is a countable family of closed sets{T1, T2, . . . } such that the union of T1, T2, . . . is the whole
plane, and the interiors of the sets Ti are pairwise disjoint. The sets T1, T2, . . . are called the tiles of T. A family T is called a tiling if it is a packing and a covering at the same timei.e. the members of T fill the space( with no gaps or overlaps. The members of T are called tiles.

The definition of a tiling ensures that the intersection of any pair of tiles of T containing t least two distinct tiles will have zero area. These objects reveal an incredible amount of simple to state
problems that translate into very complex combinatorial ones.A regular tiling is a tiling by translations of a polyomino P such that each tile in the tiling has the same surrounding by
translated copies of the tile. Tilings can be divided into two types, periodic and aperiodic,depending on whether they have any translational symmetries. According to [3] a polyomino (word derived from domino) is a geometric plane figure made of the union of finitely many edgeconnected squares from the regular square lattice. In other words it is a simply connected union of squares without holes.Polyominoes are common objects in recreational 
mathematics. An n-omino is a polyomino with n squares; the name is commonly written with a Greek prefix. Problems with polyominoes commonly involve arranging polyominoes to fill
some region, or the whole plane, without gaps or overlaps,subject to some constraints.



OBJECTIVE
The problem of deciding whether a plane can be tiled with translates of a given polyomino has been un-decidable. There is no final algorithm(at least none known).My aim is to develop an algorithm for deciding whether a plane can be tiled with translates of a given polyomino. 

ALGORITHM:


 
Let n = |b(P )| be the length of the boundary word of P. In the following algorithm the indices of the boundary word b(P) (or  b for simplicity from here on when there are indices) are taken
modulo n. For example, the letter b[-1] is of course the letter b[n - 1].The boundary word b(P) is the sum of all the boundary segments PS=0; PH=0;
// Step 1: Searching correspondence between b[0] and b[i]
for i = 1 to n - 1
if b[0] = b[i] then
// Step 2: Propagation
// Searching the largest b[x1..y1] = b[x2..y2]
// b[x1..y1] containing 0 and b[x2..y2] containing i
x1 = 0; y1 = 1; x2 = i; y2 = i + 1;
while (b[x1 - 1] = b[y2]) {x1 = x1 - 1, y2 = y2 + 1}
while (b[y1] = b[x2 - 1]) {y1 = y1 + 1, x2 = x2 - 1}
// end of Step 2
U = b[y1 + 1..x2 - 1]; V = b[y2 + 1..x1 - 1];
if |U | = |V | then
if U = V then PS=PS+1 // Step 3: Pseudo-square
PH=PH+ KMP(U , V V ) // Step 4: Pseudo-hexagon
end if
end if
end for

EXPLANATION OF THE ALGORITHM STEP BY STEP

Step 1
For each position i from 1 to n - 1, we try to match with the complementary letter of value b[0],i.e. we try to find all the positions of value (0).

Step 2
We make a propagation (scanning back and forth the boundary words) in order to have two sides in correspondence of maximal length. In other words, for each position of value b[0], we find by propagation two  complementary words X and X on the boundary word starting from X = b[0] and X = b[0] and extending the pair of complementary words (X, X ) in order to find the longest X. Then by this method we find a factorization of b(P ) by X ·U ·X · V

Step 3
We now check that the remaining sides U and V have same length. And we answer that the polyomino is a pseudo-square if U = V that is if we have found a factorization on X · Y · X ·Y with Y = U.

Step 4
We check if the polyomino is a pseudo-hexagon by searching four more sides in two-by-two correspondence, that is the factorization U = Y · Z and V = Y · Z. We use the following
property: if such factorization exists, it is provided by an occurrence of the word U = Z · Y in V V = Y · Z · Y · Z. . Thus, this algorithm decides whether a given polyomino tiles
a plane or not.
COMPLEXITY OF THE ALGORITHM
In the first step the algorithm tries to find all the positions of value b(0) with a complexity O(n).In step 2 the propagations gives complexity O(n).Thus the total complexity for steps 1
and 2 is O(n*n).that are pseudo-sqares and pseudohexagons.Step 3 gives a complexity of O(n).But it is just a continuation of step 2,so complexities are added.Thus the total
complexities for steps 1, 2 and 3 is O (n(n+n))= O(n^2).

CONCLUSION/FUTURE WORK
I would like to conclude by saying that this algorithm has been tested for polyominoes that are pseudo-sqares and pseudohexagons.I shall try to make this more effective.I would also
like to use this knowledge to research periodic tilings and design an algorithm to decide whether a given polyomino admits a periodic tiling of the plane.


ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thank Prof. Samaresh Chatterji, Prof.John Steinberg of University of British Columbia, Prof.Casey Mann of The University of Texas, and Joseph S. Myers for their invaluable support and encouragement.


REFERENCES

[1] Brass Peter, Moser William and Pach Janos , “Research Problems in Discrete Geometry"
[2] Internet :http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/und_res_projects.html
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/tiling/
http://math.uttyl.edu/cmann/math/research/research.htm
[3] Grunbaum and Sheppard , “Theory of Tilings”

Comments 1 comments
Anonymous said...

thanx dude...for your algorithm

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