Monte Carlo estimation of the number of tatami tilings

Abstract

Motivated by the way Japanese tatami mats are placed on the floor, we consider domino tilings with a constraint and estimate the number of such tilings of plane regions. We map the system onto a monomer-dimer model with a novel local interaction on the dual lattice. We use a variant of the Hamiltonian replica exchange Monte Carlo method and the multi-parameter reweighting technique to study the model. The properties of the quantity are studied beyond exact enumeration and combinatorial method. The logarithm of the number of the tilings is linear in the boundary length of the region for all the regions studied.