The perimeter generating function for nondirected diagonally convex polyominoes

Abstract

A polyomino is a finite, edge-connected set of cells in the plane. At the present time, an enumeration of all polyominoes is nowhere in sight. On the other hand, there are several subsets of polyominoes for which generating functions are known. For example, there exists extensive knowledge about column-convex polyominoes, a model introduced by Temperley in 1956. While studying column-convex polyominoes, researchers also gave a look at diagonally convex polyominoes (DCPs), but noticed an awkward feature: when the last diagonal of a DCP is deleted, the remaining object is not always a polyomino. So researchers focused their attention on directed DCPs. (A directed DCP is such a DCP that remains a polyomino when, for any i, its last i diagonals are deleted.) Directed DCPs gradually became well understood, whereas general DCPs have remained unexplored up to now.In this paper, we finally face general DCPs. Modulo a little trick, which saves us from dealing with non-polyominoes, we use the layered approach (described in chapter 3 of the book “Polygons, Polyominoes and Polycubes”, edited by Anthony Guttmann). The computations are of remarkable bulk. Our main result is the perimeter generating function for DCPs; we denote it D(d,x). The function D(d,x) is algebraic and satisfies an equation of degree eight. The formula for D(d,x) is about three pages long. That formula involves nine polynomials in d and x, and each of those polynomials is of degree 58 or more in x.