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Tiling 3D by Translates of a Single Polycube is Undecidable
Published 8 Oct 2026 in cs.CG, math.CO, and math.MG | (2610.12392v1)
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 and for a single (possibly disconnected) polyomino in .
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