Related papers: Complexity of Interlocking Polyominoes
We prove that, in all dimensions d>=4, every simple open polygonal chain and every tree may be straightened, and every simple closed polygonal chain may be convexified. These reconfigurations can be achieved by algorithms that use…
Clumsy packing is considered an inefficient packing, meaning we find the minimum number of objects we can pack into a space so that we can not pack any more object. Thus we are effectively spacing out the objects as far apart as possible so…
It is known that the polyomino ideal of simple polyominoes is prime. In this paper, we focus on multiply connected polyominoes, namely polyominoes with holes, and observe that the non-existence of a certain sequence of inner intervals of…
We consider the \emph{smallest superpolyomino problem}: given a set of colored polyominoes, find the smallest polyomino containing each input polyomino as a subshape. This problem is shown to be NP-hard, even when restricted to a set of…
We present a new type of polyominoes that can have transparent squares (holes). We show how these polyominoes can tile rectangles and we categorise them according to their tiling ability. We were able to categorise all but 6 polyominoes…
We prove the perhaps surprising result that given any three polygonal unknots in $\R^3$, then we may form the Borromean rings out of them through rigid motions of $\R^3$ applied to the individual components together with possible scaling of…
In this paper we consider a restricted class of convex polyominoes that we call Z-convex polyominoes. Z-convex polyominoes are polyominoes such that any two pairs of cells can be connected by a monotone path making at most two turns (like…
Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in general position on the plane. A set of closed convex polygons with vertices in $P$, and with pairwise disjoint interiors is called a convex decomposition of $P$ if their union is the convex hull of $P$,…
We pose and answer several questions concerning the number of ways to fold a polygon to a polytope, and how many polytopes can be obtained from one polygon; and the analogous questions for unfolding polytopes to polygons. Our answers are,…
Does a given a set of polyominoes tile some rectangle? We show that this problem is undecidable. In a different direction, we also consider tiling a cofinite subset of the plane. The tileability is undecidable for many variants of this…
We give a complete solution to the extremal topological combinatorial problem of finding the minimum number of tiles needed to construct a polyomino with $h$ holes. We denote this number by $g(h)$ and say that a polyomino is crystallized if…
We investigate how to make the surface of a convex polyhedron (a polytope) by folding up a polygon and gluing its perimeter shut, and the reverse process of cutting open a polytope and unfolding it to a polygon. We explore basic enumeration…
As a generalization of polyominoes we consider edge-to-edge connected nonoverlapping unions of regular $k$-gons. For $n\le 4$ we determine formulas for the number $a_k(n)$ of generalized polyominoes consisting of $n$ regular $k$-gons.…
We investigate the existence of closed polylines (also known as closed polygonal chains or self-crossing polygons) that intersect each of their edges the same number of times. The most general question in this corner of combinatorial…
Two vertex-labelled polygons are \emph{compatible} if they have the same clockwise cyclic ordering of vertices. The definition extends to polygonal regions (polygons with holes) and to triangulations---for every face, the clockwise cyclic…
We investigate the maximum number of intersections between two polygons with p and q vertices, respectively, in the plane. The cases where p or q is even or the polygons do not have to be simple are quite easy and already known, but when p…
A line g is a transversal to a family F of convex polytopes in 3-dimensional space if it intersects every member of F. If, in addition, g is an isolated point of the space of line transversals to F, we say that F is a pinning of g. We show…
We consider the problem of deciding, given a sequence of regions, if there is a choice of points, one for each region, such that the induced polyline is simple or weakly simple, meaning that it can touch but not cross itself. Specifically,…
Intersective polynomials are polynomials in $\Z[x]$ having roots every modulus. For example, $P_1(n)=n^2$ and $P_2(n)=n^2-1$ are intersective polynomials, but $P_3(n)=n^2+1$ is not. The purpose of this note is to deduce, using results of…
In this paper, we list several interesting structures of cyclotomic polynomials: specifically relations among blocks obtained by suitable partition of cyclotomic polynomials. We present explicit and self-contained proof for all of them,…