Counting fixed-height tatami tilings (Q2380290)

Summary: A tatami tiling is an arrangement of \(1 \times 2\) dominoes (or mats) in a rectangle with \(m\) rows and \(n\) columns, subject to the constraint that no four corners meet at a point. For fixed m we present and expand upon Dean Hickerson's [``Filling rectangular rooms with tatami mats'', \url{http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/a068920.txt}] combinatorial decomposition of the set of tatami tilings - a decomposition that allows them to be viewed as certain classes of restricted compositions when \(n \geqslant m\). Using this decomposition we find the ordinary generating functions of both unrestricted and inequivalent tatami tilings that fit in a rectangle with \(m\) rows and \(n\) columns, for fixed \(m\) and \(n \geqslant m\). This allows us to verify a modified version of a conjecture of Knuth. Finally, we give explicit solutions for the count of tatami tilings, in the form of sums of binomial coefficients.