An upper bound on the per-tile entropy of ribbon tilings

Abstract

This paper considers $n$-ribbon tilings of general regions and their per-tile entropy (the binary logarithm of the number of tilings divided by the number of tiles). We show that the per-tile entropy is bounded above by $\log_2 n$. This bound improves the best previously known bounds of $n-1$ for general regions, and the asymptotic upper bound of $\log_2 (en)$ for growing rectangles, due to Chen and Kargin.