On the Number of Distinct Tilings of Finite Subsets of $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$ With Tiles of Fixed Size

Abstract

In this work, we study the number of finite tiles $A\subset\mathbb{Z}^{d}$ of size $\alpha$ that translationally tile a finite $C\subset\mathbb{Z}^{d}$. We consider two tiles $A$ and $A'$ to be congruent if and only if one can be transformed into the other via some translation. We make several significant contributions to the study of this problem. For any $\alpha\in\mathbb{Z}^{+}$ and $C=[x_{1}]\times[x_{2}]\times\ldots [x_{d}]$ where $x_{1},\ldots,x_{d}\in\mathbb{Z}^{+}$ (which we refer to as a finite contiguous $C$), we give an efficient method for enumerating all elements of $\mathcal{T}(\alpha,C)$, where $(A,B)\in \mathcal{T}(\alpha,C)$ if and only if $A,B\subset\mathbb{Z}^{d}$, the Minkowsji sum of $A$ and $B$ equals $C$, the size of $A$ equals $\alpha$, and $|C|=\alpha|B|$. We then use this to prove a partial order on $|\mathcal{T}(\alpha,C)|$ with respect to $\alpha$ for any finite contiguous $C$. We then study the extremal question as to the the growth rate of $\text{max}_{\alpha,C}[|\mathcal{T}(\alpha,C)|]$ with respect to $|C|$. For finite contiguous $C$, we improve the trivial lower and upper bounds of $\log n$ and ${n\choose n/2}$ respectively to an upper bound of \[n^{\frac{(1+\epsilon)\log n}{\log\log n}}\] and an infinitely often super-polynomial lower bound such that, for all constants $c$ and some infinite $N\subset\mathbb{Z}^{+}$, \[\forall n\in N, \exists\alpha\in\mathbb{Z}^{+}(|\mathcal{T}(\alpha,C)|>n^{c}),\] where $n=|C|$. We conjecture that the number of tilings of any finite contiguous $C$ by tiles of size $\alpha$ is an upper bound on the number of tilings of any finite $C'\subset \mathbb{Z}^{d}$ by tiles of size $\alpha$. To begin working towards this, we prove that any $A$ of size $\alpha$ that tiles some finite contiguous $C$ itself has at most as many tilings by tiles of size $\alpha'$ as there are tilings of $[\alpha]$ by tiles of size $\alpha'$.