Counting d-dimensional polycubes and nonrectangular planar polyominoes

Abstract

A planar polyomino of size n is an edge-connected set of n squares on a rectangular 2-D lattice. Similarly, a d-dimensional polycube (for d ≥ 2) of size n is a connected set of n hypercubes on an orthogonal d-dimensional lattice, where two hypercubes are neighbors if they share a (d -1)-dimensional face. There are also two-dimensional polyominoes that lie on a triangular or hexagonal lattice. In this paper we describe a generalization of Redelmeier's algorithm for counting two-dimensional rectangular polyominoes [Re81], which counts all the above types of polyominoes. For example, our program computed the number of distinct 3-D polycubes of size 18. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first tabulation of this value. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.