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Undecidability of Translational Tiling of the Plane with Orthogonally Convex Polyominoes

Published: June 15, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2506.12726v1

By: Chao Yang, Zhujun Zhang

Potential Business Impact:

Makes computers unable to solve some shape-fitting puzzles.

The first undecidability result on the tiling is the undecidability of translational tiling of the plane with Wang tiles, where there is an additional color matching requirement. Later, researchers obtained several undecidability results on translational tiling problems where the tilings are subject to the geometric shapes of the tiles only. However, all these results are proved by constructing tiles with extremely concave shapes. It is natural to ask: can we obtain undecidability results of translational tiling with convex tiles? Towards answering this question, we prove the undecidability of translational tiling of the plane with a set of 7 orthogonally convex polyominoes.

Page Count
20 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Combinatorics