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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Ever since we went hunting for tiles for our first remodeling, I've been thinking about why not Wang tiles[1][2] were available.

I mean obviously it'd be too much cost and hassle, since you need at least 5 different tiles to tile a plane, but I'm still curious how it would actually turn out on a real floor or wall, with an interesting pattern on the tiles.

While you need multiple Wang tiles, at least they can be square rather than a rather awkward polygonal shape. So there's that...

[1]: https://grahamshawcross.com/2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-aperio...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile

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Purely from an aesthetics standpoint, I'm guessing its because they have a tendency to form quasi-repeating patterns and long rivers which are generally unsightly (which is subjective):

The long string of horizontal yellow diamonds and upside down blue "darts" in this image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/Wa...

Or the red "dominoes" in this image: https://grahamshawcross.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/13tiling...

seems as if this could be solved by using a different palette. The red sticks out cuz it’s deep dark red more than cuz it’s dominoes. Maybe.

Maybe, I think in general though, this falls into uncanny valley territory.

Humans like patterns or randomness, we sort of hate quasi-versions of either (See: our disdain for blurry pictures).

They did a mall in Helsinki with Penrose tiles, I really like it.

http://www.neverendingbooks.org/penrose-tiles-in-helsinki

Yeah. I wonder how the tilesetters actually did the concrete tile-laying part. There are "quasiperiodic" Penrose tilings that are composed of fairly regular "macroblocks", but this Keskuskatu tiling looks pretty random to me. Did they just have huge printouts of the pattern? Did they develop an intuition of which tile goes where after a while? Were they happy to do something different for a chance, or annoyed by the convoluted task? :D

The Salesforce center in SF looks like it's Penrose tiles, but I suspect they are cheating and are using a large segment repeated on each section of the skirt.

Maybe, but Penrose himself was involved, so I'd be very bummed if that were true.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) has received approval from Dr. Roger Penrose, the eminent British mathematical physicist, to incorporate his groundbreaking geometrical pattern in the design of the exterior walls of the future Transbay Transit Center (TTC) designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects (PCPA). Dr. Penrose and PCPA are working in tandem to incorporate Dr. Penrose’s elegant design, known as the Penrose Rhombus Tiling, in the skin of the TTC. The design is remarkably simple but unique because it can be extended infinitely without repeating itself. The Penrose system is ideal for the perforations in the metal panels that will form the curved exterior of the Transit Center.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130711006350/en/Rog...

The reason why I'm skeptical is because it's cut out metal. Actual tiles would be easy to do it "correctly", but I don't imagine them I dunno, laser cutting? each skirt piece individually. I'd love to be proven wrong though

Why not? If it's laser cut, then it's almost no additional cost to make each sheet different. It's all software.

Isn't the point of Penrose tiles that it's made of 2 shapes (i.e. you only need two arbitrarily movable stamps to make it work)?

Out of curiosity, is it idiomatic to call a street next to a shopping center a mall? Ignorant Finn here.

No, probably my age and background. Street with shops and no cars.

I think in the US that would colloquially be called an:

Outdoor mall

Mall alone being the 80s style indoor walkable variety. A 'strip mall' usually a single (often deformed to some degree) line of stores along a sidewalk next to a huge parking lot, also often with an island restaurant or small store that wants to stand out closer to the street edge of said lot.

"Mall" can refer to a pedestrian area within a city more generally; shops are optional, e.g.,

https://nps.gov/nama/index.htm

Also, sometimes cars,

https://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/st-jamess-park/things-to...

Sometimes. “Mall” alone generally refers to a big indoor shopping space with many distinct stores; I'd probably call the outdoor version an... “outdoor mall”.

Or, on a much smaller scale...

http://www.tessellations.org/real-materials-tessellations-16...

I don’t think this would be too much cost and hassle at all. People make all sorts of fancy tiles and patterns with them. Four colors as triangles is so simple I’m really surprised it doesn’t exist. Maybe a good niche online business for someone.

Re : cool tiling options

There's girih tiles. It's like 5 tiles that you can do a bunch of stuff with. Invented by some based geomystics like 1000 years ago.

And there's kisrhombille. Lots of options there.

Not Wang tiles, but a quasiperiodic tiling discovered by Robert Ammann: https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/floors.html

I love the idea, maybe not in wiki colors but with some stylization. One concern thought, how can I know how many tiles of each type I will need?

Yeah definitely not the colors used to highlight the pattern...

The way you construct a set of Wang tiles determines how many you'll need. The first link in my previous post shows how to construct them for various set sizes.

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