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In information visualization and graphic design, Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed within a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each tile can be used to visualize information associated with the tile's position within the tiling.
Contents
Truchet tiles were first described in a 1704 memoir by Sébastien Truchet entitled "Mémoire sur les combinaisons", and were popularized in 1987 by Cyril Stanley Smith.
Contrasting triangles
The tile originally studied by Truchet is split along the diagonal into two triangles of contrasting colors. The tile has four possible orientations.
Some examples of surface filling made tiling such a pattern.
With a scheme:
With random placement:
Quarter-circles
A second common form of the Truchet tiles, due to Smith (1987), decorates each tile with two quarter-circles connecting the midpoints of adjacent sides. Each such tile has two possible orientations.
We have such a tiling:
This type of tile has also been used in abstract strategy games Trax and the Black Path Game, prior to Smith's work.
Diagonal
A labyrinth can be generated by tiles in the form of a white square with a black diagonal. As with the quarter-circle tiles, each such tile has two orientations. Nick Montfort considers the single line of computer code required to generate such patterns - 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 - to be "a concrete poem, a found poem".