Translational Aperiodic Sets of 7 Polyominoes

TL;DR

This paper proves that translational tiling of the plane with 7 polyominoes is undecidable and constructs a family of aperiodic sets of this size, breaking a long-standing record in the field.

Contribution

It introduces the first undecidability result for tiling with 7 polyominoes and constructs aperiodic sets of this size, advancing understanding of tiling complexity.

Findings

Undecidability of plane tiling with 7 polyominoes.

Construction of aperiodic sets of size 7.

Breaks the 30-year-old record for minimal aperiodic set size.

Abstract

Recently, two extraordinary results on aperiodic monotiles have been obtained in two different settings. One is a family of aperiodic monotiles in the plane discovered by Smith, Myers, Kaplan and Goodman-Strauss in 2023, where rotation is allowed, breaking the 50-year-old record (aperiodic sets of two tiles found by Roger Penrose in the 1970s) on the minimum size of aperiodic sets in the plane. The other is the existence of an aperiodic monotile in the translational tiling of $\mathbb{Z}^n$ for some huge dimension $n$ proved by Greenfeld and Tao. This disproves the long-standing periodic tiling conjecture. However, it is known that there is no aperiodic monotile for translational tiling of the plane. The smallest size of known aperiodic sets for translational tilings of the plane is $8$, which was discovered more than $30$ years ago by Ammann. In this paper, we prove that translational tiling of the plane with a set of $7$ polyominoes is undecidable. As a consequence of the undecidability, we have constructed a family of aperiodic sets of size $7$ for the translational tiling of the plane. This breaks the 30-year-old record of Ammann.