An Efficient Algorithm for the Escherization Problem in the Polygon Representation

Abstract: In the Escherization problem, given a closed figure in a plane, the objective is to find a closed figure that is as close as possible to the input figure and tiles the plane. Koizumi and Sugihara's formulation reduces this problem to an eigenvalue problem in which the tile and input figures are represented as $n$-point polygons. In their formulation, the same number of points are assigned to every tiling edge, which forms a tiling template, to parameterize the tile shape. By considering all possible configurations for the assignment of the $n$ points to the tiling edges, we can achieve much flexibility in terms of the possible tile shapes and the quality of the optimal tile shape improves drastically, at the cost of enormous computational effort. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to find the optimal tile shape for this extended formulation of the Escherization problem.