Alternating-sign matrices and domino tilings. II (Q685998)

[For Part I see ibid., No. 2, 111-132 (1992; Zbl 0779.05009).] For a family of planar regions, called Aztec diamonds, the authors discuss tilings of these regions by dominoes. In this, second part of the paper the authors give two more proofs that the Aztec diamond of order \(n\) has exactly \(2^{n(n+1)/2}\) domino tilings. The first uses the representation theory of \(\text{GL} (n)\), and the second uses generating functions to record information about certain statistics of a tiling and how it relates to other such tilings. Also studied are connections with the square-ice model of statistical mechanics.