Toward a Canonical Representation of Blocked Rectangular Grids with an Application to Finite Tiling Problems

Abstract

Given the collection of all $m\times n$ rectangular grids which have a fixed number $1\le r\le mn$ of blocked cells, we explicitly describe a proper subset of the collection which is guaranteed to contain at least one grid from each equivalence class under symmetry, eliminating the majority of redundant grids. We analyze the extent to which redundant grids remain in the reduced set, and give general cases in which our methods exactly produce a complete set of canonical representatives for the equivalence classes. As an application of our results, we specify collections of polyomino tiling problems and find all solvable grids in each collection.

23 pages