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by litigilicious
2692 days ago
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No, if you mean ceramic or stone tiles for floors or walls. I spent a bunch of time digging into this when I bought my current house because I initially could not believe that these were unobtanium and that custom cutting would be the only way to install such a pattern in my bath. In short, there are 2 reasons for this. The first is that at the physical scale required for the nifty aperiodicity of the tiling to be apparent in a typical home (<= ~100cm^2 or 16 in^2, aka the areal size of a "standard bathroom tile" in North America,) tiles are typically sold and installed not individually but in mats of many tiles adhered to a backing webbing. This is not possible with an aperiodic tile pattern where the pattern does not, by definition, repeat predictably. So that's the first reason: practicality. The second reason is exactly what you might expect if you have been around the sun more than 2 dozen times: Roger Penrose is notoriously litigious. He patented the aperiodic tilings he "discovered" in the late 70s, but famously sued Kimberly-Clark for making toilet tissue with one of these tilings in the 90s claiming copyright violation - and won. Even though the patent is long expired, copyright lives longer. Ironically, given that the infringing bog rolls were almost certainly roller-embossed, Kimberly-Clark's Kompetent Counsel seems to have missed a trick - their expression was NOT strictly a Penrose tiling as they are, by definition, aperiodic. You can't emboss a continuous Penrose tiling from a roller. |
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The tiling can be recursively generated. (called "inflation" and "deflation") That is, starting from a Penrose tiling, another one with smaller tiles can be generated. This means that the patches of webbing can be tiled as Penrose tiles, yet be subdivided such that the result is a valid Penrose tiling with smaller tiles.
In case you are trying to imagine this... good luck. The recursive generation does not retain the large tile divisions as small tile divisions. The large tile divisions become jagged edges. This is fine; the tile industry already tolerates this issue with hex tiles on webbing.