Tile-Packing Tomography Is \mathbb{NP}-hard

Discrete tomography deals with reconstructing finite spatial objects from their projections. The objects we study in this paper are called tilings or tile-packings, and they consist of a number of disjoint copies of a fixed tile, where a tile is defined as a connected set of grid points. A row projection specifies how many grid points are covered by tiles in a given row; column projections are defined analogously. For a fixed tile, is it possible to reconstruct its tilings from their projections in polynomial time? It is known that the answer to this question is affirmative if the tile is a bar (its width or height is 1), while for some other types of tiles $\mathbb {NP}$ -hardness results have been shown in the literature. In this paper we present a complete solution to this question by showing that the problem remains $\mathbb {NP}$ -hard for all tiles other than bars.     

Towards a neighborhood simplification of tile systems: From Moore to quasi-linear dependencies

Self-assembly is the process by which objects aggregate independently and form complex structures. One of the theoretical frameworks in which the process of self-assembly can be embedded and formally studied is that of tile systems. A Wang tile is a square unit, with glues on its edges, attaching to other tiles which have matching glues, and forming larger and larger structures. In this paper we concentrate over two basic, but essential, self-assembling structures done by Wang tiles. The first one, called ribbon, is a non-self-crossing wire-like structure, in which successive tiles are adjacent along an edge, and where tiles are glued to their predecessor and successor by use of matching glues. The second one, called zipper, is a similar contiguous structure, only that here, all touching tiles must have matching glues on their abutting edges, independently of their position in the structure. In case of Wang tiles, it has been shown that these two structures are equivalent. Here we generalize this result for the case when the tiles have eight glues, four on their edges and four on their corners. Thus we show that an eight neighborhood dependency, namely the Moore neighborhood, can be simulated by a quasi-linear dependency.     

Semi‐Stochastic Tilings for Example‐Based Texture Synthesis

We investigate semi‐stochastic tilings based on Wang or corner tiles for the real‐time synthesis of example‐based textures. In particular, we propose two new tiling approaches: (1) to replace stochastic tilings with pseudo‐random tilings based on the Halton low‐discrepancy sequence, and (2) to allow the controllable generation of tilings based on a user‐provided probability distribution. Our first method prevents local repetition of texture content as common with stochastic approaches and yields better results with smaller sets of utilized tiles. Our second method allows to directly influence the synthesis result which—in combination with an enhanced tile construction method that merges multiple source textures—extends synthesis tasks to globally‐varying textures. We show that both methods can be implemented very efficiently in connection with tile‐based texture mapping and also present a general rule that allows to significantly reduce resulting tile sets.     

Hierarchical self assembly of patterns from the Robinson tilings: DNA tile design in an enhanced Tile Assembly Model

We introduce a hierarchical self assembly algorithm that produces the quasiperiodic patterns found in the Robinson tilings and suggest a practical implementation of this algorithm using DNA origami tiles. We modify the abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM), to include active signaling and glue activation in response to signals to coordinate the hierarchical assembly of Robinson patterns of arbitrary size from a small set of tiles according to the tile substitution algorithm that generates them. Enabling coordinated hierarchical assembly in the aTAM makes possible the efficient encoding of the recursive process of tile substitution.     

The 4-way deterministic tiling problem is undecidable

It is shown that the (infinite) tiling problem by Wang tiles is undecidable even if the given tile set is deterministic by all four corners, i.e. a tile is uniquely determined by the colors of any two adjacent edges. The reduction is done from the Turing machine halting problem and uses the aperiodic tile set of Kari and Papasoglu.     

The effect of malformed tiles on tile assemblies within the kinetic tile assembly model

Many different constructions of proofreading tile sets have been proposed in the literature to reduce the effect of deviations from ideal behaviour of the dynamics of the molecular tile self-assembly process. In this paper, we consider the effect on the tile assembly process of a different kind of non-ideality, namely, imperfections in the tiles themselves. We assume a scenario in which some small proportion of the tiles in a tile set are “malformed”. We study, through simulations, the effect of such malformed tiles on the self-assembly process within the kinetic Tile Assembly Model (kTAM). Our simulation results show that some tile set constructions show greater error-resilience in the presence of malformed tiles than others. For example, the 2- and 3-way overlay compact proofreading tile sets of Reif et al. (DNA Computing 10, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3384. Springer, 2005) are able to handle malformed tiles quite well. On the other hand, the snaked proofreading tile set of Chen and Goel (DNA Computing 10, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3384. Springer, 2005) fails to form even moderately sized tile assemblies when malformed tiles are present. We show how the Chen–Goel construction may be modified to yield new snaked proofreading tile sets that are resilient not only to errors intrinsic to the assembly process, but also to errors caused by malformed tiles.     

Tilings: recursivity and regularity

We establish a first step towards a “Rice theorem” for tilings: for non-trivial sets, it is undecidable to know whether two different tile sets produce the same tilings of the plane. Then, we study quasiperiodicity functions associated with tilings. This function is a way to measure the regularity of tilings. We prove that, not only almost all recursive functions can be obtained as quasiperiodicity functions, but also, a function which overgrows any recursive function.     

About thin arithmetic discrete planes

Arithmetic discrete planes are sets of integer points located within a fixed bounded distance (called thickness) of a Euclidean plane. We focus here on a class of “thin” arithmetic discrete planes, i.e., on a class of arithmetic discrete planes whose thickness is smaller than the usual one, namely the so-called standard one. These thin arithmetic discrete planes have “holes” but we consider a thickness large enough for these holes to be bounded. By applying methods issued from the study of tilings and quasicrystals derived from cut and project schemes, we first consider configurations that occur in thin arithmetic discrete planes. We then discuss substitution rules acting on thin discrete planes, with these geometric rules mapping faces of unit cubes to unions of such faces.     

Efficient texture synthesis using strict Wang Tiles

Wang Tiles are constructed from four texture samples, arranged so they can always match a choice of other tiles at two edges. Because they are precomputed, Wang Tiles are a very efficient way to generate textures on the fly. But matching problems occur within tiles and at the corners of adjacent tiles. By replacing the edge-matching texture samples with a new sample in the center of the tile, and using the graph cut path-finding algorithm, we overcome these problems and introduce additional texture diversity. Our s-Wang Tiles are a stricter interpretation of the original Wang Tile design, and our tile set is also smaller than that required by ω-Tiles: only eight different tiles are required for a non-repetitive titling.     

Distances on rhombus tilings

The rhombus tilings of a simply connected domain of the Euclidean plane are known to form a flip-connected space (a flip is the elementary operation on rhombus tilings which rotates 180^° a hexagon made of three rhombi). Motivated by the study of a quasicrystal growth model, we are here interested in better understanding how “tight” rhombus tiling spaces are flip-connected. We introduce a lower bound (Hamming-distance) on the minimal number of flips to link two tilings (flip-distance), and we investigate whether it is sharp. The answer depends on the number n of different edge directions in the tiling: positive for n=3 (dimer tilings) or n=4 (octagonal tilings), but possibly negative for n=5 (decagonal tilings) or greater values of n. A standard proof is provided for the n=3 and n=4 cases, while the complexity of the n=5 case led to a computer-assisted proof (whose main result can however be easily checked manually).     

Combining self-healing and proofreading in self-assembly

Molecular self-assembly is a promising approach to bottom-up fabrication of complex structures. A major impediment to the practical use of self-assembly to create complex structures is the high rate of error under existing experimental conditions. Recent theoretical work on algorithmic self-assembly has shown that under a realistic model of tile addition and detachment, error correcting tile sets are possible that can recover from the attachment of incorrect tiles during the assembly process. An orthogonal type of error correction was recently considered as well: whether damage to a completed structure can be repaired. It was shown that such self-healing tile sets are possible. However, these tile sets are not robust to the incorporation of incorrect tiles. It remained an open question whether it is possible to create tile sets that can simultaneously resist wholesale removal of tiles and the incorporation of incorrect ones. Here we present a method for converting a tile set producing a pattern on the quarter plane into a tile set that makes the same pattern (at a larger scale) but is able to withstand both of these types of errors.

Fixed-point tile sets and their applications

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 fields, 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?s self-reproducing automata; similar ideas were also used by P. Gács in the context of error-correcting computations. This construction is rather flexible, so it can be used in many ways. We show how it can be used to implement substitution rules, to construct strongly aperiodic tile sets (in which any tiling is far from any periodic tiling), to give a new proof for the undecidability of the domino problem and related results, to characterize effectively closed one-dimensional subshifts in terms of two-dimensional subshifts of finite type (an improvement of a result by M. Hochman), to construct a tile set that has only complex tilings, and 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. For the latter, we develop a hierarchical classification of points in random sets into islands of different ranks. Finally, we combine and modify our tools to prove our main result: There exists a tile set such that all tilings have high Kolmogorov complexity even if (sparse enough) tiling errors are allowed. Some of these results were included in the DLT extended abstract (Durand et al., 2008 [9]) and in the ICALP extended abstract (Durand et al., 2009 [10]).     

A supervised approach for automated surface defect detection in ceramic tile quality control

Surface defect detection is very important to guarantee the quality of ceramic tiles production. At present, this process is usually performed manually in the ceramic tile industry, which is low efficiency and time-consuming. For small surface defects detection of high-resolution ceramic tiles image, an intelligent detection method for surface defects of ceramic tiles based on an improved you only look once version 5 (YOLOv5) algorithm is presented. Firstly, the high-resolution ceramic tile images are cropped into slices, and the Bottleneck module in the YOLOv5s network is optimized by introducing depthwise convolution and replaced in the whole network. Then, feature extraction is performed using the improved Shufflenetv2 backbone, and an attention mechanism is added to the backbone network to improve the feature extraction ability. The path aggregation network (PAN) and Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) neck are used to enhance the feature extraction, and finally, the YOLO head is used to identify and locate the ceramic tile defects. The multiple sliding windows detection method is proposed to detect the original ceramic tile image which is faster than the single sliding window detection method. The experimental results show that compared with the original YOLOv5s detection algorithm, the parameters of the model are reduced by 20.46 %, the floating point operations are reduced by 26.22 %, and the mean average precision (mAP) of the proposed method is 96.73 % in the ceramic tile image slice test set which has 1.93 % improvement in mAP than the original YOLOv5s. Compare with other object detection methods, the method proposed in this paper also has certain advantages. In the high-resolution ceramic tile images test set, the mAP of the proposed algorithm is 86.44 % by using the multiple sliding window detection method. The ceramic defect detection experiment has verified the feasibility of the method proposed in this paper.     

Strongly normal sets of contractible tiles in N dimensions

The second and third authors and others have studied collections of (usually) convex “tiles”—a generalization of pixels or voxels—in R² and R³ that have a property called strong normality (SN): for any tile P, only finitely many tiles intersect P, and any nonempty intersection of those tiles also intersects P. This paper extends basic results about strong normality to collections of contractible polyhedra in Rⁿ whose nonempty intersections are contractible. We also give sufficient (and trivially necessary) conditions on a locally finite collection of contractible polyhedra in R² or R³ for their nonempty intersections to be contractible.     

Activatable tiles for compact robust programmable molecular assembly and other applications

Algorithmic DNA self-assembly is capable of forming complex patterns and shapes, that have been shown theoretically, and experimentally. Its experimental demonstrations, although improving over recent years, have been limited by significant assembly errors. Since 2003 there have been several designs of error-resilient tile sets but all of these existing error-resilient tile systems assumed directional growth of the tiling assembly. This is a very strong assumption because experiments show that tile self-assembly does not necessarily behave in such a fashion, since they may also grow in the reverse of the intended direction. The assumption of directional growth of the tiling assembly also underlies the growth model in theoretical assembly models such as the TAM. What is needed is a means for enforce this directionality constraint, which will allow us to reduce assembly errors. In this paper we describe a protection/deprotection strategy to strictly enforce the direction of tiling assembly growth so that the assembly process is robust against errors. Initially, we start with (1) a single “activated” tile with output pads that can bind with other tiles, along with (2) a set of “deactivated” tiles, meaning that the tile’s output pads are protected and cannot bind with other tiles. After other tiles bind to a “deactivated” tile’s input pads, the tile transitions to an active state and its output pads are exposed, allowing further growth. When these are activated in a desired order, we can enforce a directional assembly at the same scale as the original one. Such a system can be built with minimal modifications of existing DNA tile nanostructures. We propose a new type of tiles called activatable tiles and its role in compact proofreading. Activatable tiles can be thought of as a particular case of the more recent signal tile assembly model, where signals transmit binding/unbinding instructions across tiles on binding to one or more input sites. We describe abstract and kinetic models of activatable tile assembly and show that the error rate can be decreased significantly with respect to Winfree’s original kinetic tile assembly model without considerable decrease in assembly growth speed. We prove that an activatable tile set is an instance of a compact, error-resilient and self-healing tile-set. We describe a DNA design of activatable tiles and a mechanism of deprotection using DNA polymerization and strand displacement. We also perform detailed stepwise simulations using a DNA Tile simulator Xgrow, and show that the activatable tiles mechanism can reduce error rates in self assembly. We conclude with a brief discussion on some applications of activatable tiles beyond computational tiling, both as (1) a novel system for concentration of molecules, and (2) a catalyst in sequentially triggered chemical reactions.     

Monitoring defects of ceramic tiles using fuzzy subtractive clustering-based system identification method

In this paper, a subtractive clustering fuzzy identification method and a Sugeno-type fuzzy inference system are used to monitor tile defects in tile manufacturing process. The models for the tile defects are identified by using the firing mechanical resistance, water absorption, shrinkage, tile thickness, dry mechanical resistance and tiles temperature as input data, and using the concavity defect and surface defects as the output data. The process of model building is carried out by using subtractive clustering in both the input and output spaces. A minimum error model is developed through exhaustive search of clustering parameters. The fuzzy model obtained is capable of predicting the tile defects for a given set of inputs as mentioned above. The fuzzy model is verified experimentally using different sets of inputs. This study intends to examine and deal with the experimental results obtained during various stages of ceramic tile production during 90-day period. It is believed, that the results obtained from the present study could be considered in other ceramic tiles industries, which experienced similar forms of defects.     

Non-standard cut classification of fuzzy sets

Several important non-standard cut sets of lattice-valued fuzzy sets are investigated. These are strong cuts, “not less” and “neither less nor equal” cuts. In each case it is proved that collection of all cuts of any lattice-valued fuzzy set form a complete lattice under inclusion. Decomposition theorem (representation by cuts) is proved for “neither less nor equal” cuts. Necessary and sufficient conditions under which two lattice-valued fuzzy sets with the same domain have equal families of corresponding cut sets are given.     

Search methods for tile sets in patterned DNA self-assembly

The Pattern self-Assembly Tile set Synthesis (PATS) problem, which arises in the theory of structured DNA self-assembly, is to determine a set of coloured tiles that, starting from a bordering seed structure, self-assembles to a given rectangular colour pattern. The task of finding minimum-size tile sets is known to be NP-hard. We explore several complete and incomplete search techniques for finding minimal, or at least small, tile sets and also assess the reliability of the solutions obtained according to the kinetic Tile Assembly Model.     

Fuzzy-rough nearest neighbour classification and prediction

Nearest neighbour (NN) approaches are inspired by the way humans make decisions, comparing a test object to previously encountered samples. In this paper, we propose an NN algorithm that uses the lower and upper approximations from fuzzy-rough set theory in order to classify test objects, or predict their decision value. It is shown experimentally that our method outperforms other NN approaches (classical, fuzzy and fuzzy-rough ones) and that it is competitive with leading classification and prediction methods. Moreover, we show that the robustness of our methods against noise can be enhanced effectively by invoking the approximations of the Vaguely Quantified Rough Set (VQRS) model, which emulates the linguistic quantifiers “some” and “most” from natural language.