Fixed Point and Aperiodic Tilings

Bruno Durand (1) , Andrei Romashchenko (2) , Alexander Shen (1)

1 LIF - Laboratoire d'informatique Fondamentale de Marseille - UMR 6166
2 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme

An aperiodic tile set was first constructed by R.Berger while proving the undecidability of the domino problem. It turned out that aperiodic tile sets appear in many topics ranging from logic (the Entscheidungsproblem) to physics (quasicrystals) We present a new construction of an aperiodic tile set that is based on Kleene's fixed-point construction instead of geometric arguments. This construction is similar to J. von Neumann self-reproducing automata; similar ideas were also used by P. Gacs in the context of error-correcting computations. The flexibility of this construction allows us to construct a ``robust'' aperiodic tile set that does not have periodic (or close to periodic) tilings even if we allow some (sparse enough) tiling errors. This property was not known for any of the existing aperiodic tile sets.

Mots clés: aperiodic tiling; Kleene's theorem; robust tiling; error-correcting; self-similar tiling

Domaines: Complexité [cs.CC]; Mathématique discrète [cs.DM]

Bruno Durand, Andrei Romashchenko, Alexander Shen. Fixed Point and Aperiodic Tilings. 12th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, Sep 2008, Kyoto, Japan. pp.276-288, ⟨10.1007/978-3-540-85780-8_22⟩. ⟨hal-00256364v5⟩