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Tiling 3D by Translates of a Single Polycube is Undecidable

Erik D. Demaine, Stefan Langerman

Source record

Source: arXiv

Published: Oct 8, 2026

arXiv: 2610.12392

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Source abstract

We prove co-RE-completeness, and thus undecidability, of the following problem: given a single (connected) polycube, decide whether it tiles 3D Euclidean space by translations. We reduce from Wang tiling using the decorated two-prime Sudoku construction of Greenfeld and Tao and a cyclic encoding adapted from OpenAI's 3D aperiodic tile, and apply a reduction of Kim to make the prototile connected (via faces). Dimension three is optimal: translational monotiling is known to be decidable in Z2\mathbb{Z}^2 and for a single (possibly disconnected) polyomino in R2\mathbb{R}^2.

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