Puzzle Zapper Blog

I left polytans out of my post about polyforms with fractional weight cells.

Previously, we looked at this set of dihexes and trihexes with half-weight hexes affixed, which we used in a generalized type of tiling where fractional cells may overlap if the weights on those cells sum to one.

Marking external edges of polyforms leads naturally to restrictions on tilings that make for good puzzles.

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In planning out blog posts, I typically use the rule of thumb that a post should contain between two and four images.

A few months ago, I noticed that a king can tour a pentomino tiling so that every cell in each pentomino is visited exactly once in an uninterrupted sequence, and the tour forms a closed loop.

I posted last year about a path puzzle using polyiamond tiles.

Welcome to the 236th Carnival of Mathematics!

Early last year I became aware of a paper by Jamie Tucker-Foltz on Locked Polyomino Tilings.

Here’s a tiling of the 3+2-ominoes: This use of a plus sign seems natural enough, but we might want to think a bit more about what it implies.

In 2022, Jacques Ferroul sent some notes on a remarkable exploration in polyominoes to Kate Jones, who shared them with George Sicherman, who in turn forwarded them to me.