Truchet tiles where each cell carries a stack of concentric arcs rather than a single one.
Bands, not lines
The ordinary Truchet tile carries one arc per corner. This one carries NumArcs — seven
by default — nested concentric arcs sharing the same centre:
for (var i = 0; i < NumArcs; i++)
Because the radii are the same in every tile, a band leaving one cell is met by a band of
identical width entering the next, and the join is invisible. The tiling reads as ribbon
rather than as line.
A fifth of the rows.
Two fifths. What looks like a single wide ribbon is three separate arcs drawn at three
radii, and nothing connects them to each other except being parallel.
Three fifths.
Four fifths.
The full grid: four hundred cells at three arcs each, and still only two bits of choice
per cell.
That ratio is the point. The information content is unchanged from a plain Truchet
tiling — 400 tiles, 800 bits — while the amount of ink is seven times greater, and the
result reads as a far more elaborate object than it is.
Six renderings
| Rendering | Grid | Arcs | Ink |
|---|
| Cyber Cyan | 20×20 | 7 | cyan on black |
| Iron Bands | 10×10 | 8 | silver on near-black |
| Solar Gold | 25×25 | 9 | gold on dark navy |
| Lacework | 35×35 | 5 | pale blue on near-black |
| Ember | 18×18 | 6 | red-orange on near-black |
| Museum Cyan | 20×20 | 7 | cyan on black, matted and framed |
Grid size and arc spacing together determine the actual number of arcs drawn per cell;
each rendering has its own seed, so the arrangements differ entirely. Iron Bands uses a
coarse 10×10 grid, giving each cell enough radius to stack eight arcs into heavy ribbon
bands. Lacework uses a fine 35×35 grid with tight arc spacing to produce a dense,
delicate web.
Museum Cyan is the same grid and seed as Cyber Cyan, presented the way it would hang
on a wall. It wraps the piece in the MuseumFrame presentation layer from
SkiaSharp.Extensions rather than rendering it a sixth way: the grid draws as it always
has, and the frame — a gallery wall, a cream mat with a bevel rule, a near-black
frame, and a soft shadow — is drawn around it. Because the frame presents the piece
instead of re-rendering it, Museum Cyan has no progression of its own; the gallery
carries it as a finished plate, not among the variants.
Determinism
The generator is seeded from the preset and consumed once per cell, row by row. The
generator is System.Random, which the project’s determinism policy flags as not
guaranteed stable across .NET versions.
