Tag: Random Tiling

An attractive aspect of hexagonal patterns is that they can repeat in interesting ways across a cycling jersey. This is partly due to the fact that a hexagon can be divided up into three equal lozenge shapes, as seen near the neck of the top right jersey. These shapes can be combined in imaginative ways, as displayed in the lower two examples.

This three-way division of a hexagon can create a 3D optical illusion called a “Necker cube”, which can appear to flip from convex to concave and back again. The orange patch can appear to be the top of a cube viewed from above or the ceiling in a corner, viewed from below. See if this happens if you stare at the image below.

Spoiler alert: from here things gets a bit mathematical

Tessellations

A tessellation, or tiling, is a way of covering a plane with polygons of various types. Tessellations have many interesting mathematical properties relating to their symmetries. It turns out that there are exactly 17 types of periodic patterns. Roger Penrose, who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the formation of black holes, discovered many interesting aperiodic tilings, such as the Penrose tiling.

While some people were munching on mince pies before Christmas, I watched a thought-provoking video on a related topic, released by the Mathologer, Burkard Polster. He begins by discussing ways of tiling various shapes with dominoes and goes on describe something called the Arctic Circle Theorem. Around the middle of the video, he shifts to tiling hexagon shapes with lozenges, resulting in images with the weird 3D flipping effect described above. This prompted me to spend rather a lot of time writing Python code to explore this topic.

After much experimentation, I created some code that would generate random tilings by stochastically flipping hexagons. Colouring the lozenges according to their orientation resulted in some really interesting 3D effects.

Neckered

I used my code to create random tilings of much bigger hexagons. It turned out that plotting the image on every iteration was taking a ridiculous amount of time. Suspending plotting until the end resulted in the code running 10,000 time faster! This allowed me to run 50 million iterations for a hexagon with 32 lozenges on each size, resulting in the fabled Arctic Circle promised by the eponymous theorem. The central area is chaotic, but the colours freeze into opposite solid patches of orange, blue and grey outside the circumference of a large inscribed circle.

Why does the Arctic Circle emerge?

There are two intuitive ways to understand why this happens. Firstly, if you consider the pattern as representing towers with orange tops, then every tower must be taller than the three towers in front of it. So if you try to add or remove a brick randomly, the towers at the back are more likely to become taller, while those near the front tend to become shorter.

The second way to think about it is that, if you look carefully, there is a unique path from each of the lozenges on the left hand vertical side to the corresponding lozenge on the right hand vertical side. At every step, each path either goes up (blue) or down (grey). The gaps between the various paths are orange. Each step of the algorithm flips between up-down and down-up steps on a particular path. On the large hexagon, the only way to prevent the topmost cell from being orange is for the highest path to go up (and remain blue) 32 times in a row. This is very unlikely when flips are random, though it can happen more often on a smaller size-6 hexagon like the one shown in the example.

Resources

A Jupyter notebook demonstrating the approach and Python code for running longer simulations are available on this GitHub page.

Back to cycling jerseys

The Dutch company DSM is proudly sponsoring a professional cycling team in 2021. And a hexagon lies at the heart of the DSM logo, that will appear on the team jerseys.