Gray Codes for Column-Convex Polyominoes and a New Class of Distributive Lattices

Stirling Chow, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Canada.
Frank Ruskey, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Canada.

Abstract:

We introduce the problem of polyomino Gray codes, the listing of all members of certain classes of polyominoes such that successive polyominoes differ by some well-defined closeness condition, such as the movement of one cell. We discuss various closeness conditions and provide several Gray codes for the class of column-convex polyominoes where the number of cells in each column is fixed. For one of our closeness conditions there is a natural new class of distributive lattice that arises. The partial order is defined on the set of m-tuples [S1] X [S2] X \cdots X [Sm], where [S] = {0,1,...,S-1 } and each Si > 1. The cover relations are (p1,p2,...,pm) < (p1+1,p2,...,pm) and (p1,p2,...,pj,pj+1,...,pm) < (p1,p2,...,pj-1,pj+1+1,...,pm). We also discuss some properties of this lattice.


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