My New Hat

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My New Hat

Postby Mathimagics » Fri May 05, 2023 9:09 pm

Some of you might (?) have noticed my new avatar ... or maybe not! :?

It is, of course, the "Einstein" hat. This 13-sided polygon, recently discovered by David Smith et al, is the very first aperiodic monotile ever discovered, solving an existence problem that has persisted for at least the past century.

When I'm not hunting for new 18-clue puzzles, I have been building some tools to explore the properties of these hats.

If you download the Smith paper (which you can access via reference [3] of the Wiki article linked above), you will find the background (Fig 2.11, p18) for my image below. It's a H7/H8 "super cluster", formed by combining clusters (patches of 7 or 8 hats).

The central hat for each cluster is coloured green. These are the only hats that have been "flipped" (reversed) - all the others are "normal", with a different colour used according to the hat's 6 possible orientations. So hats with the same colour all have the same orientation (other than the green hats).

The first-level clusters are outlined in blue. The super-cluster is formed by replacing each patch with a larger cluster (more or less!).

Each hat, by the way, consists of 8 identical "kites", which my avatar shows in different colours.

Image
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Re: My New Hat

Postby eleven » Sat May 06, 2023 8:13 pm

I had heard about this tile. They also showed, that there are arbitrary many of them, which you can get by reforming the original in some way (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLQrHz7CQf4 2:47). One of them looks to have just 7 sides. Is it a "simpler" Einstein tile ?
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Re: My New Hat

Postby Mathimagics » Sat May 06, 2023 8:48 pm

There are indeed a number of variants of the "hat" tile discussed in their paper. See Figure 2.3 on p11.

I am fairly sure from my reading, that any such variant, where the corresponding polygon has less than 13 sides, means that the tile is no longer aperiodic - it admits some periodic tilings.

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Re: My New Hat

Postby eleven » Sat May 06, 2023 9:03 pm

Ah, ok, thanx.
[Added:] Yes, an answer i now read to the same question was, that only the original tile is always aperiodic.
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