Related papers: Folding Polyominoes with Holes into a Cube
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…
A polyomino is a polygonal region with axis parallel edges and corners of integral coordinates, which may have holes. In this paper, we consider planar tiling and packing problems with polyomino pieces and a polyomino container $P$. We give…
It is well-known that the question of whether a given finite region can be tiled with a given set of tiles is NP-complete. We show that the same is true for the right tromino and square tetromino on the square lattice, or for the right…
We show that every polycube tree can be unfolded with a 4x4 refinement of the grid faces. This is the first constant refinement unfolding result for polycube trees that are not required to be well-separated.
A cube is an 8-rep-tile: it is the union of eight smaller copies of itself. Is there a set with a hole which has this property? The computer found an interesting and complicated solution, which then could be simplified. We discuss some…
We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…
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…
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…
Can folding a piece of paper flat make it larger? We explore whether a shape $S$ must be scaled to cover a flat-folded copy of itself. We consider both single folds and arbitrary folds (continuous piecewise isometries $S\rightarrow R^2$).…
We show that packing axis-aligned unit squares into a simple polygon $P$ is NP-hard, even when $P$ is an orthogonal and orthogonally convex polygon with half-integer coordinates. It has been known since the early 80s that packing unit…
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 investigate the folding problem that asks if a polygon P can be folded to a polyhedron Q for given P and Q. Recently, an efficient algorithm for this problem has been developed when Q is a box. We extend this idea to regular polyhedra,…
A hinged dissection of a set of polygons S is a collection of polygonal pieces hinged together at vertices that can be folded into any member of S. We present a hinged dissection of all edge-to-edge gluings of n congruent copies of a…
Say that a cone is a commutative monoid in which x+y=0 implies that x=y=0. We show that cones (resp. simple cones) of many kinds order-embed or even embed unitarily into refinement cones (resp. simple refinement cones) of the same kind,…
The moduli space of Frobenius manifolds carries a natural involutive symmetry, and a distinguished class - so-called modular Frobenius manifolds - lie at the fixed points of this symmetry. In this paper a classification of semi-simple…
You find a stain on the wall and decide to cover it with non-overlapping stickers of a single identical shape (rotation and reflection are allowed). Is it possible to find a sticker shape that fails to cover the stain? In this paper, we…
We explore the following problem: given a collection of creases on a piece of paper, each assigned a folding direction of mountain or valley, is there a flat folding by a sequence of simple folds? There are several models of simple folds;…
In this study, we investigate the computational complexity of some variants of generalized puzzles. We are provided with two sets S_1 and S_2 of polyominoes. The first puzzle asks us to form the same shape using polyominoes in S_1 and S_2.…
What is the maximum number of holes enclosed by a $d$-dimensional polyomino built of $n$ tiles? Represent this number by $f_d(n)$. Recent results show that $f_2(n)/n$ converges to $1/2$. We prove that for all $d \geq 2$ we have $f_d(n)/n…
A solid wooden cube fragments into pieces as we sequentially drill holes through it randomly. This seemingly straightforward observation encompasses deep and nontrivial geometrical and probabilistic behavior that is discussed here.…