English

The aperiodic Domino problem in higher dimension

Discrete Mathematics 2022-02-16 v1 Computational Complexity Dynamical Systems

Abstract

The classical Domino problem asks whether there exists a tiling in which none of the forbidden patterns given as input appear. In this paper, we consider the aperiodic version of the Domino problem: given as input a family of forbidden patterns, does it allow an aperiodic tiling? The input may correspond to a subshift of finite type, a sofic subshift or an effective subshift. arXiv:1805.08829 proved that this problem is co-recursively enumerable (Π01\Pi_0^1-complete) in dimension 2 for geometrical reasons. We show that it is much harder, namely analytic (Σ11\Sigma_1^1-complete), in higher dimension: d4d \geq 4 in the finite type case, d3d \geq 3 for sofic and effective subshifts. The reduction uses a subshift embedding universal computation and two additional dimensions to control periodicity. This complexity jump is surprising for two reasons: first, it separates 2- and 3-dimensional subshifts, whereas most subshift properties are the same in dimension 2 and higher; second, it is unexpectedly large.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.07377,
  title  = {The aperiodic Domino problem in higher dimension},
  author = {Antonin Callard and Benjamin Hellouin de Menibus},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.07377},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

15 pages, accepted to STACS 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:37:57.973Z