Electronics and Communications in Japan, Part 3, Vol. 83, No.
2, 2000
Translated from Denshi Joho Tsushin Gakkai Ronbunshi, Vol. J80-A, No. 11, November 1997, pp. 1951–1959
Analog Neuro-Based Approach to Tiling Problem Using Fitting
Function of Polyominoes
Hiroshi Ninomiya, Takeshi Nakayama, and Hideki Asai
Department of Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Japan 432
SUMMARY
The tiling problem is a typical NP-complete problem,
where the polyominoes are to be arranged without a gap on
a finite checkerboard. In this study, the arrangement of l
polyominoes on an m u n checkerboard is considered. As
the first step, the conventional parallel algorithm using the
maximum neural network is verified. Then, the authors
propose a solution procedure for the tiling problem, where
the analog neural network is used in addition to the fitting
function. Lastly, the proposed method and the conventional
method are compared, and it is shown that the proposed
method is also effective for more complex tiling problems.
© 1999 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 83(2):
1–10, 2000
Key words: Tiling problem; polyomino; fitting func-
tion; analog neural network; maximum neural network.
1. Introduction
The tiling problem is the problem where polyomi-
noes are to be arranged without a gap on a finite checker-
board. By polyomino is meant a polygon that can be
represented as a set of squares. There have been many
discussions of the tiling problem using polyominoes [1–4].
All of the latter, however, are sequential procedures. Refer-
ence 5 first used the parallel procedure, where the tiling
problem is handled as an optimization problem using a
stochastic neural network. The tiling problem is an NP-
1 © 1999 Scripta Technica
complete problem, and the convergence to the true solution
is not satisfactory in Ref. 5, even though a small-sized
problem is considered in the experiment.
Later, Refs. 6 and 7 considered a larger-sized prob-
lem. Assuming that the rotation of the polyomino is not
considered, a tiling problem is solved successfully where
10 polyominoes are arranged on a 7 u 7 checkerboard. The
problem is to find a unique solution from approximately 1.3
u 1014 candidates, which is a very difficult problem. In Refs.
6 and 7, however, there remained the problem that the
minimum of the energy function does not always corre-
spond to the optimal solution [8].
On the other hand, Hopfield and Tank showed that an
approximate solution for the traveling-salesman problem
(TSP) can be derived using a neural network [9], and many
subsequent reports have been presented concerning the
optimization problem [6, 7, 10]. The authors have shown
design procedures for the digital sequential circuit and the
discrete Walsh transformer using the Hopfield network [11,
12]. The energy function for an optimization problem such
as TSP, however, contains the local convergence problem,
and it is not always true that a satisfactory result is obtained.
From such a viewpoint, a new energy function is presented
for the TSP, based on city adjacency, which prevents local
convergence to some extent [13–15].
This article considers the tiling problem and im-
proves the energy function used in the conventional method
by introducing a function representing the fitting of the
polyominoes [18–21]. Then, the maximum neural network
used in the conventional method is handled as an analog
neural network. In other words, escape from local solutions
can be realized by allowing analog values for the response
CCC1042-0967/00/020001-10
of the neuron. Using the method proposed by the authors,
a tiling problem is solved in which 14 polyominoes are
arranged on a 10 u 10 checkerboard. The total number of
candidates for this problem is about 1.6 u 1024, and it is thus
shown that the proposed algorithm can handle a larger and
more complex tiling problem.
2. Conventional Method
The conventional method (called method 1) for solv-
ing the tiling problem is considered in this section [6, 7].
For simplicity, a tiling problem is considered in the follow-
ing, where 10 polyominoes are to be arranged on a 7 u 7
checkerboard [6, 7]. In method 1, the maximum neuron
given by the following equation is used as the neuron
model:
(1)
where Vijk and Uijk are the output and input, respectively, of
the ijk-th neuron.
For each polyomino, the neural array representing the
coordinates and the sideboard representing the shape, both
7 u 7 in size, are prepared as in Fig. 1. In order to solve the
sample problem, 10 u 7 u 7 neural arrays are needed. In the
proposed procedure, the polyomino on the sideboard is
projected as a marker on the neural array. By this procedure,
a neuron as a marker can represent the coordinate the shape
of the polyomino.
Using the neural array composed of 10 u 7 u 7 Vijk
and the sideboard of size Vgijk as shown in Fig. 2, the sample
problem is solved. The operational equation for the ijk-th
neuron is given by
(2)
Here, the first term is the constraint that only one of the
polyominoes can fire on the neural array. The second term
is the constraint that the markers will not overlap at the same
place, looking through the neural array from the front side.
The third term is the objective condition that the polyomi-
noes do not overlap, looking through the sideboards from
the front.
fi is the function that detects the overlap, while
representing the shape of the polyomino. It is given as
follows:

Fig. 2. Neural representation for the 7 u 7 tiling

Fig. 1. Ten polyominoes and their markers. problem.

2
 (3)
Here, Vgist represents the value on the sideboard, with i, s,
and t as coordinates. When marker Vijk fires, s and t are
determined according to the shape of the polyomino, and
we have Vgist 1.
In Fig. 2, the isolated space detection sideboard is
used to eliminate the isolated space, as the 11th sideboard.
By isolated space is meant the space where the following
conditions are satisfied:
When these conditions are satisfied, the isolated space can
be eliminated by establishing
for the 11th sideboard.
As another point, the convergence to the global mini-
mum is improved in method 1, by well balancing the use of
(5)
For the optimal solution for the tiling problem in the
method using Eq. (5), only the outputs Vijk of l neurons, that
is, the same number as that of polyominoes, are 1, and the
outputs Vijk of the other neurons are 0. On the other hand,
the second term of Eq. (5) has a nonzero value in the optimal
solution of the tiling problem. The second term is a con-
straint to avoid overlap of the marker neurons of the layers
for each coordinate of the l-layered m u n neural array. It is
a term that takes the value 0 when m u n neurons fire
without an overlap. This contradicts the previous property
of the optimal solution for the tiling problem. Consequently,
in this optimization problem, the energy function does not take
the minimum for the true solution in method 1.
From such a viewpoint, this article proposes an en-
ergy function based on Eq. (5), where the second term of
the energy function given by Eq. (5), which has been a
problem in method 1, is deleted, and a new objective
condition is included.
3. Proposed Method
3.1. Energy function containing fitting
function and analog neural network
cfi and cfiVijk in the third term of Eq. (2). The fourth In the proposed method, the energy function for the
term is the hill-climbing term, in order to avoid the local tiling problem is newly defined as
minimum and to converge toward the global minimum. The
function hx takes the value 1 when x = 0, and the value 0
otherwise. The 7 u 7 tiling problem is solved in method 1
using such an operational equation.
According to Ref. 16, the operational Eq. (2) for the
neuron can be represented by the partial derivative of the
energy function as shown in Eq. (4). Then, the energy
function in method 1 is given by Eq. (5).

(4)

3
 (6)

where Vijk represents the output of the ijk-th neuron.

Here, the first term is a constraint so that only one of
the polyominoes on the i-th neural network array fires. The
second term is the constraint that the polyominoes do not
overlap, as in the third term of Eq. (2). Consequently, fi is
represented as in Eq. (3), respectively. The third term is the
objective condition for detecting the contact of each
polyomino with other polyominoes and the outer frame. It
is defined to take the value 0 when all polyominoes are in Fig. 3. Optimal solution and fitting function.
complete contact with other polyominoes and the outer (a) Optimal solution. (b) Fitting function,
frame. wni 12 in this example.
As shown in Fig. 3(a), all polyominoes in the optimal
solution are in contact with other components at the periph-
ery. The fitting function gi : {gi|i 1, 2, . . . , 10} is de-
fined as follows according to the shape of the polyomino.
It is given as follows:
(7)
The overlapping function given by Eq. (3) and the
fitting function given by Eq. (7) have maximum values that
greatly vary with the area and shape of the polyomino.
Consequently, Eqs. (3) and (7) are normalized as follows in
Gi represents the length of the periphery of the i-th the proposed method, so that only the effects of the overlap
polyomino [Fig. 3(b)]. gci is the function that examines
whether or not the i-th polyomino is in contact with other
polyominoes or the outer frame. It is defined as
and contact of the polyominoes are reflected on the energy
function, independently of the area and shape of the
polyomino. By this measure, it is no longer necessary to
adjust greatly the coefficients B and C of the energy func-
tion for each problem:
(9)
(10)

where Fi is the area of the polyomino, with the area of the

unit square being defined as 1.
By this procedure, the energy function (6) is rewritten
as

(8)

where Vgist is the value on the sideboard as in Eq. (3), with

i, s, and t as coordinates. s and t are determined by the
coordinate of the polyomino periphery. The fourth term
forces the neuron output to the binary value (0, 1), which is
needed in using the analog neuron model.

4

(11)
The energy function of Eq. (11) takes the minimum and the
value 0 when all polyominoes are arranged in the given
checkerboard without an overlap and all polyominoes are
in completed contact with other polyominoes or the outer
frame. In this sense, Eq. (11) obviously differs from Eq. (5).
According to Eq. (4), the operational equation for the
ijk-th neuron is given as
(12)
where Uijk is the input to the ijk-th neuron.
In the proposed method, the following sigmoid func-
tion is used instead of Eq. (1) as the input–output relation
of the neuron:
(13)
When the neuron with the sigmoid function as the input–
output relation is used, very small changes of the input are
reflected in the energy function. With the analog repre-
sentation of the input–output relation, the analog value
Vgijk of the sideboard is defined as the sum of markers (Fig.
4). This produces the following effect.
In method 1, only the marker with the maximum
input is reflected on the sideboard. In the proposed method,
Fig. 4. An analog expression of the 6th polyomino in Fig. 1.
5
the polyomino corresponding to each output of the marker
[Fig. 4(a)] is arranged on the sideboard [Fig. 4(b)], and the
values are added as Vgijk [Fig. 4(c)]. As a result, the effects
of all polyominoes that have the possibility of being placed
on that point are reflected in the network behavior accord-
ing to the magnitude of the possibility.
By the magnitude of the possibility is meant the value
of the neuron. In other words, the neuron with a larger
output value has a higher possibility of being placed at the
point. In contrast, in method 1, only the marker with the
largest input value, that is, only the effect of the polyomino
that has the highest possibility of being placed at the point
at the considered time, is reflected in the behavior of the
network [Fig. 4(d)]. Thus, in the conventional method in
which the analog neural network is used, only one neuron
is allowed to fire on each array composed of the maximum
neural network. But in the proposed method, the output of
the neuron is reflected in the energy function, even if the
output value is small.
3.2. Simulation procedure
Essentially in the proposed method, Eq. (12) is nu-
merically integrated by the progressive Euler method. The
simulation procedure is as follows.
Step 0: Initial setting.
Step 1: A random variable is used as the input Uijk
to the neuron:
(14)
Step 2: Using Eq. (13), the output value Vijk is
calculated.
Step 3: All Vgijk are initialized.
Step 4: The output value is added to Vgijk related to
the marker:
 where Umax 1.0 and Umin 1.0.
Step 8: If the steady state is reached (E = 0), go to
step 1. Otherwise, the time t is increased by 't 102.
Step 9: If the number of iterations exceeded T, end.
If not, go to step 2.

The initial value for the input Uijk to the neuron is

empirically determined in step 1, according to Refs. 6 and
(15) 7. In step 5, a procedure to modify the operational equation
according to the number of iterations [6, 7] is applied, in
order to realize the escape from the local solution.
Step 5: The operational equation dUijk / dt is calcu-
lated using Eq. (12):
4. Result of Simulation and Discussion

4.1. Result of simulation

In order to examine the convergence to the optimal

solution, simulations are performed for the five examples
shown in Fig. 5 for more than 100 iterations. The results are
given in Table 1, where complexity refers to the total
number of possible arrangements except for the rotation
and inversion. In other words, complexity is the total num-
ber of possible arrangements of all polyominoes on the
checkerboard. In practice, however, the difficulty of the
tiling problem will be affected greatly by the shape and
arrangement of the polyominoes. This report, however,
is not greatly concerned with the difficulty of the tiling
Step 6: Uijkiter  1 is calculated by the progres- problem.
sive Euler method: When the rotation of the polyomino is considered, the
complexity is increased by the power of 4, compared to the
case where rotation is not considered, since the polyomino
can take any of the four directions. When inversion of the
(17)
polyomino is considered, the complexity is further in-
creased by the power of 2. The complexity of the problem
Step 7: Setting of saturation level for the input is tremendously increased when rotation or inversion is
value: considered. Consequently, the problem is discussed in this
article without considering rotation and inversion, as in
Refs. 6 and 7.
As shown in Table 1, the procedure converges to the
optimal solution for all examples without falling in a local

Fig. 5. Examples.

6
 Table 1. Simulation results

minimum, even though the initial value for the input Uijk to tion is shown in Table 2, where it is seen that the first and
the neuron is given by the random variable as in Eq. (14). fourth terms affect greatly the speed of convergence. As to
The proposed method is compared to method 1 as follows. the effect of the initial value D u RANDD 1.0 u 106, the
On simulation by the authors, method 1 could not reach the true solution is always obtained for all examples, if Z is set
true solutions for examples 2 to 5. For example 1, the between 1 and 3.
average number of iterations is 930 in method 1, when the In order to examine the dependence on the initial
coefficients in Eq. (5) are set as A = 1.0, B = 1.0, C = 1.0,
and D = 1.0 and for Z = 7. The number of iterations in the
proposed method is 922. In other words, the number of
iterations in reaching the true solution are nearly the same.
The coefficients of the energy function used in this simula-
tion by method 1, however, are the values empirically
obtained as realizing the fastest convergence. Thus, it is
concluded that the proposed method can handle a larger-
scale problem than can the conventional method.
4.2. Discussion of coefficients in energy
function
As the first step, the coefficients for the first to third
terms of the energy function are normalized to 1.0, follow-
ing Refs. 6 and 7. The coefficient for the fourth term is set
as 0.0, in order to eliminate its effect. In other words, it is
set that A = 1.0, B = 1.0, C = 1.0, and D = 0.0. Then, the
simulation is executed by varying Z. The result of simula-
Table 2. Average numbers of iterations
7
value, the initial value is set as D u RANDD 1.0 u 102
in example 1. The result of simulation is shown in Table 3,
where it is seen that the percentage of convergence to the
true solution depends on the value of Z. This implies that
the procedure may converge to different patterns when the
initial value is varied.
As the next step, the effects of the second and third
terms, that is, the effects of the overlapping function and
the fitting function, are examined as follows. The coeffi-
cients B and C are varied by steps of 0.1 in example 1, and
the simulations are performed. Table 4 shows the range of
coefficients for which the true solution is reached, together
with the number of iterations. Since those terms are normal-
ized by Eqs. (9) and (10) for the area and shape of the
polyomino, the effects of the overlapping function and the
fitting function are directly represented by varying B and
C. It is seen from Table 4 that C of the fitting function has
a smaller degree of freedom than does B of the overlapping
function.
 Table 3. Simulation results for different initial values D
It is seen in both Tables 1 and 2 that the average
number of iterations does not always increase when the
complexity of the problem is increased. The average num-
ber of iterations seems to be of the same order of magnitude
as that of the complexity. It is left for a future study to
investigate whether this property is due to the parallelism
of the neural network or due to the property that the number
of iterations depends on the difficulty of the tiling problem,
in terms of the shape and placement of the polyomino, and
not on the complexity. The definition of the difficulty is also
left for the future.
4.3. Discussion of transient behavior of
network
As a result of simulation, the authors have found a
very interesting transient behavior of polyominoes, which
is considered next. Figure 6 shows an example of the
transient behavior for example 1. The output value of the
marker is large when the thick line is used for the darker
polyomino. More than one of the same polyomino may
exist, since the analog neural network is used, and there can
be more than one marker neuron with nonzero values for
each polyomino.
It should be noted in Fig. 6 that the polyominoes start
to be settled from the frame, or the polyomino that is almost
to settle is suppressed by the competition with other
polyominoes. This is considered as an effect of combining
the analog neural network and the fitting function. By
introducing the fitting function, the polyominoes that fit
well to the frame and can contact easier with the frame, such
as the shapes of a bar, a bent bar, or a bar with two bent
Table 4. Effect of parameters B and C
8
1.0 u 102 )
corners, are settled by 250 iterations in Fig. 6. Then, for the
newly formed frame (formed by the settled polyominoes),
the polyominoes that are easier to fit are settled.
The effect of the analog neural network is seen, for
example, in the behavior of the square polyomino appearing
at the upper right of Fig. 6. Although the square polyomino
once starts to be settled, a bar-shaped polyomino appeared
in competition. Then, the square polyomino is moved to
another optimal place eventually by the effect of the fitting
function. This is due to the effect of the analog neural
network on the behavior of the network, which reflects all
polyominoes that can be placed at the point. Similar phe-
nomena are observed in other examples.
It was verified as a result that the proposed procedure
converges to the optimal solution of the time 100% for an
initial value near 0, in all five examples. There is no guar-
antee, however, that the solution shown in Fig. 5 is the
unique solution, under the condition that rotation and inver-
sion are not allowed. No optimal solution was actually
obtained in this study other than those shown in Fig. 5. It is
shown by simulation that the proposed method is more
effective than method 1, for larger and more complex tiling
problems. When the scale of the problem (i.e., the area of
the checkerboard and the number of polyominoes) is in-
creased, a larger number of neurons is required. In such a
case, it may happen that the procedure falls in a local
solution and the optimal solution is not obtained, even if the
proposed procedure is applied. It seems still necessary to
consider the energy function and the setting of the parame-
ter for larger-scale problems.
 Fig. 6. Transient dynamic movement of polyominoes and convergence for example 1.
5. Conclusions
This article has discussed a solution method for the
tiling problem using a neural network. A solution method
with better performance than the conventional method is
obtained by defining a new energy function including the
fitting function and is applied using an analog neural net-
work. Through several examples, the convergence rate of
the proposed method is examined by simulation. It is shown
that the proposed method is also effective for relatively
large-scale and complex tiling problems, to which the con-
ventional method has not been applied.
The following problems are left for further study. The
difficulty of the tiling problem in terms of the shape and
placement of the polyominoes should be investigated from
the viewpoint of the role of the proposed method. For the
case where the size of the problem is enlarged, including
the case where rotation and inversion of the polyominoes
are considered, the energy function and the setting of the
parameters should be investigated. The effect of Z on the
network dynamics is to be examined in detail.
10. Lee BW, Shue BJ. Hardware annealing in analog
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AUTHORS (from left to right)

Hiroshi Ninomiya (student member) graduated from Shizuoka University in 1993 and completed the master’s program
in 1995. He is presently a doctoral student there. Since 1995, he has been a special researcher at JSPS. He has been engaged in
research on neural networks.

Takeshi Nakayama graduated from Shizuoka University in 1994 and completed the master’s program in 1996. He then
joined Matsushita Electric Corporation. His graduate school research concerned neural networks.

Hideki Asai (member) graduated from Keio University in 1980 and completed the doctoral program in 1985. He is
presently a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at Shizuoka University. His research largely concerns LSI-CAE
and parallel computation systems. He holds a D.Eng. degree. He received a 1988 Takayanagi Encouragement Award, a 1989
50-Year Memorial Award from Tokai Chapter of IEICE, and a 1993 Chio-Saito Encouragement Award. He was secretary of the
IEEE CAS Society Tokyo Chapter in 1994 and 1995. He is presently secretary, Study Group Nonlinear Problems and Study
Group Parthenon, IEICE.

10