Trilobite and crab, tiles and puzzle

thingiverse

This Thing crafts trilobite-and-crab patternings. They are detailed in The Trilobyte and Crab: A Full Explanation by Chaim Goodman-Strauss. These tiles can be assembled into designs that fill the entire plane, but no such design can have a translational symmetry. This Thing holds three versions: * A pair of tiles with markings on top. A proper tiling matches these markings, revealing the non-periodic yet systematic structure of a tiling. * A 50-piece jigsaw puzzle showcasing a 3D map of Earth's topography and bathymetry. There are only two piece shapes apart from the edges, and these pieces interlock in such a way that they can only fit together in a manner matching the markings above. * A pair of pieces with both markings and interlocking for use as a doormat. (Work in progress.) The code in the Jupyter notebook is not very general but can be adapted to produce other variants, such as a jigsaw puzzle with more pieces, this one fitting on a single mk3 bed.