The unambiguity conjecture for substitution-system refinement

From papers

A substitution system is a tiling system with finitely many tile types and a substitution rule, and Algorithm~ is the paper's refinement procedure that augments each tile type with information about its surrounding tile types. A system is unambiguous when the refined tile types contain enough information to distinguish the relevant local configurations. Unambiguity conjecture. For any substitution system, there exists n0n\geqslant 0 such that applying Algorithm~ nn times makes it unambiguous. Repeated refinement records information from progressively larger neighborhoods and is sufficient in the examples discussed, but the general assertion is left as a conjecture.

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Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Simon Tatham, “Finite-state transducers for substitution tilings”, arXiv:2512.16595 (2026).

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