Top all-time · #9573
Graham Shawcross
Personal blog · grahamshawcross.commathdesign
Graham Shawcross's personal blog at grahamshawcross.com covers math and design. Since 2013, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Wang Tiles and Turing Machines”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its posts on Wang tiles and their connection to Turing machines and the undecidable tiling problem, including a 2012 post on Wang tiles and Turing machines.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Graham Shawcross PhD Architect
Most-linked posts?
- Wang Tiles and Turing Machines2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-09-01
What Hacker News says?
The "can you tile the plane aperiodically" that started the investigation into these tile sets, the disproof was that proving it was equivalent to solving the halting problem... and thus the tile set is equivalent to a Turing machine. I keep wondering if https://grahamshawcross.com/2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-turing... is practical as a bathroom wall.
Comment linking /2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-turing-machines/
on “Wang tile”Submitted Counting ants as a story · 63 points
HN discussionWhile not quite as "oh, that's neat" - a set of Wang dominoes might be interesting to people who know what it is (incidentally, Wang is the logician that had a conjecture that proved false and lead to the aperiodic set that Penrose came up with). One aspect of the "this is undecidable" was that it to prove it is equivalent to solving the Halting Problem. > In 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the domino prob…
Comment linking /2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-turing-machines/
on “A Game of Life on Penrose Tilings”Submitted Wang Tiles and Turing Machines as a story · 52 points
HN discussionEver 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 squ…
Comment linking /2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-aperiodic-tiling/
on “Mathematicians discover shape that can tile a wall and never repeat”Submitted Wang Tiles and Turing Machines (2012) as a story · 32 points
HN discussionI think there's a mistake on the Fibonacci sequence tiling, this one: http://grahamshawcross.com/2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-turing-... Shouldn't there be a diagonal up/right light/dark green line between 5 and 8? I.e. tiles (6,3), (6,4), (7,2), (7,3), numbering from 1 (x,y) style?
Comment linking /2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-turing-machines/usersgrahamshawcrossdocumentsapplicationaperiodic_tilingdw-3/
on “Wang Tiles and Turing Machines (2012)”Submitted Severely Constrained Design (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInteresting slides, though the end with the simulation goes a bit... odd. I suspect some context or overriding narration is lost in going from dominoes to the simulation hypothesis. I also believe that the Wang tile set is misplaced in the "accidentally Turing complete". That was part of his conjecture. From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hao_Wang_(academic) > One of Wang's most important contributions was…
Comment linking /2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-turing-machines/
on “From Brainfuck to Domino Computers [pdf]”Submitted Wang Tiles and Aperiodic Tiling as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
