Question on Conway tilings

Conway in http://olympiads.mccme.ru/lktg/2009/4/articles/conway.pdf provided some elegant techniques for identifying tiling of simply connected regions. Are there similar techniques for regions that are not simply connected such as torus in higher dimensions (in the sense that the tiles can be conformal shaped based on their position on the torus)?

-

1 Answer

The short answer is "no, not really". In general, there are virtually no positive 3- (and higher) dimensional results on tilings, see my old survey, section 8 on a few sporadic results. Instead, most results are negative, proving hardness of tilebility (see e.g. our recent 3-dim domino paper).

-
Is there a positive result for tiling on $2$-dimensional surface of torus in $\Bbb R^3$? Is there a reference for negative result? – Turbo Oct 28 '13 at 7:15
@J.A Presumably you would be more interested in the flat torus (obtained by abstractly identifying opposite edges of a parallelogram, or from the Clifford embedding in $\mathbb{R}^4$) rather than the (non-uniform) surface of a doughnut? – Adam P. Goucher Sep 26 '14 at 14:05