[HN Gopher] Polyominoes (2019)
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       Polyominoes (2019)
        
       Author : fatneckbeardz
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2022-10-15 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.researchgate.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.researchgate.net)
        
       | dynamic_sausage wrote:
       | This text seems to quickly get rather technical, with theorems
       | and stuff. I would suggest looking at Golomb's classical
       | _Polyominoes_ first
       | https://archive.org/details/polyominoes00golo/page/n7/mode/2...
       | 
       | If you like playing with polyominoes, there is a really fun
       | chesslike table game inspired by them called Blokus, and someone
       | wrote an open-source engine for it:
       | https://pentobi.sourceforge.io/
       | 
       | Of course, as already noted in another comment, there's the
       | ultimate tetromino game: Tetris (literally defined as tetromino
       | tennis)...
        
         | cableshaft wrote:
         | There's tons of polyomino games that have come out in the past
         | 8 or so years. I wouldn't necessarily say they do a better job
         | than Blokus did (imo, I really like Blokus), but it's
         | interesting to see what game designers have been doing with the
         | concept lately.
         | 
         | Uwe Rosenberg in particular has designed a bunch of games
         | playing around with the polyomino concept, starting with
         | Patchwork, then a trilogy of games Indian Summer, Cottage
         | Garden, and Spring Meadow, and then culminating in a rules-
         | heavy game A Feast for Odin.
         | 
         | Phil Walker-Harding designed a very popular one called
         | Barenpark, where you cover spots on a board which unlock
         | different types of tiles and new boards.
         | 
         | A recently released game that's been well received that
         | utilizes a lazy susan for tile selection is called Planet
         | Unknown.
         | 
         | There's also a tile drafting game called Isle of Cats that's
         | quite popular as well.
         | 
         | A game that combines polyominoes with roll and write games
         | that's quite popular is Cartographers.
         | 
         | Patchwork kicked off this new trend in board games, and was
         | released in 2014.
        
       | tyleo wrote:
       | Upon reading the first few pages and seeing the pictures I
       | realized that all Tetris pieces are made of shapes with 4
       | adjacent cells. Additionally, all permutations of 4-cell shapes
       | are represented in Tetris. It also clicked that the prefix is
       | similar to tetra.
       | 
       | I suspect many other folks realized this already but it was a
       | charming lightbulb moment for myself.
        
       | fatneckbeardz wrote:
       | A 404 page book on polyominoes
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | tartakovsky wrote:
         | No wonder it doesn't load.
        
       | alcover wrote:
       | Polyominoes have been obsessing me. Not tiling but counting them.
       | No formula has been yet found. Their _free_ numbers (i.e up to
       | rotations and flipping) go                 1, 1, 2, 5, 12, 35,
       | 108, 369, 1285, ...
       | 
       | Meaning for ex. there are 5 tetrominoes :                 #
       | #               #               #             #               #
       | # #             #               # #              #             #
       | # #                #             # #               # #
       | 
       | The myterious sequence follows a ~4 growth rate.
       | 
       | I've been (nowhere as a mathematician) exploring this problem for
       | years, generating them and trying in vain to find patterns in
       | their properties.
       | 
       | I'd love readers with a high view in combinatorics telling what
       | they think of this problem. Do you think a formula will one day
       | be found or rather that there can't be a closed one for some
       | necessary reason ?
        
         | lkozma wrote:
         | This is a very nice and deep question. Are you aware of the
         | published research on the problem?
         | 
         | The growth rate is indeed around 4 and now known to be strictly
         | above 4: https://page.mi.fu-
         | berlin.de/rote/Papers/pdf/Lambda-4.pdf
         | 
         | If I remember correctly, there was a non-rigorous argument for
         | a concrete conjectured value not far above 4.
        
           | alcover wrote:
           | Thanks for the link.                 we obtain 4.00253176 as
           | a certified lower bound
           | 
           | How intringing it's strictly just above 4 !
           | 
           | Maybe it has to do with symmetries. The proportion of
           | symmetric polys in successive generations goes towards zero.
           | I suspect that this 'pollutes' the asymptot.
           | 
           | About published research, I just glanced at the little I
           | found, (as I often can't do more than glance, being limited
           | in Maths.)
           | 
           | Also I prefer to go at it naively first.
        
       | NKosmatos wrote:
       | A000105: Number of free polyominoes (or square animals) with n
       | cells
       | 
       | https://oeis.org/A000105
        
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