English

Finite-state transducers for substitution tilings

Combinatorics 2026-03-17 v2

Abstract

We present a suite of algorithmic techniques for handling substitution tilings by treating a tile's hierarchy of supertiles in a purely combinatorial fashion using finite state automata. The resulting techniques are very convenient for practical generation of patches of tilings such as hats, Spectres and Penrose tiles, both random and deliberately selected. They also permit some analyses of the represented tiling. A particular product of this process is two substitution systems for the hat tiling which are "unambiguous" in that a single tile address uniquely determines the rest of the plane.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.16595,
  title  = {Finite-state transducers for substitution tilings},
  author = {Simon Tatham},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16595},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

53 pages, 53 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:31:33.515Z