A linear algorithm for Brick Wang tiling

Abstract: The Wang tiling is a classical problem in combinatorics. A major theoretical question is to find a (small) set of tiles which tiles the plane only aperiodically. In this case, resulting tilings are rather restrictive. On the other hand, Wang tiles are used as a tool to generate textures and patterns in computer graphics. In these applications, a set of tiles is normally chosen so that it tiles the plane or its sub-regions easily in many different ways. With computer graphics applications in mind, we introduce a class of such tileset, which we call sequentially permissive tilesets, and consider tiling problems with constrained boundary. We apply our methodology to a special set of Wang tiles, called Brick Wang tiles, introduced by Derouet-Jourdan et al. in 2015 to model wall patterns. We generalise their result by providing a linear algorithm to decide and solve the tiling problem for arbitrary planar regions with holes.