Deterministic aperiodic tile sets (Q1293238)

Wang tiles are square tiles with colored edges; a tile set is a finite collection of Wang tiles, placed with their edges horizontal or vertical. R. Berger in 1966 found a finite set of colored square tiles such that no tiling of the plane by translates of these tiles is periodic. R. M. Robinson in 1971 gave another set of aperiodic tiles. The present authors use these Robinson tiles extensively. They construct an aperiodic set of Wang tiles that is strongly deterministic in the sense that two adjacent edges of a tile determine the tile uniquely. They place the problem in a wider context of the characterization of algebraically compact non-positively curved manifolds that do not admit a Riemannian metric or strictly negative sectional curvature, specifically, whether the fundamental group of such manifolds always contains a free abelian subgroup of rank 2. In 1990 Gromov asked the same question about the group acting co-compactly on \(X\), a locally, finite, metric polyhedron satisfying the \(\text{CAT}(0)\)-inequality, \(X\) not hyperbolic in the Gromov sense. The tiling group of the set described above is not hyperbolic and acts discretely and co-compactly on a \(\text{CAT}(0)\) space.