Height Functions
For some classes of tilings on a regular grid in two dimensions, it is possible to define a height function associating an integer to the nodes of the grid. For instance, draw a chessboard, fix a node with height 0, then for any node there is a path from to it. On this path define the height of each node (i.e. corners of the squares) to be the height of the previous node plus one if the square on the right of the path from to is black, and minus one otherwise.
More details can be found in Kenyon & Okounkov (2005).
Read more about this topic: Domino Tiling
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