Is it possible to tile a grid with L-shaped tetrominoes (like the one shown) without overlap or letting tetrominoes outside?
Note: Tetrominoes can be rotated or flipped.
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If that tiling is possible, one needs 9 tetrominoes to do so. Imagine that each column is alternately colored black and white. Notice that each tetromino will tile either 3 black tiles and 1 white tile OR 3 white tiles and 1 black tile. We know that there are 18 black and 18 white tiles, so we will let k be the number of tetrominoes covering 3 black and 1 white tile while ( 9 − k ) covering 1 black and 3 white tiles. We can set up a system of equations that governs how the tiles are covered like so: 3 k + ( 9 − k ) = 1 8 black tiles and k + ( 9 − k ) ( 3 ) = 1 8 white tiles . Both of these equations are unsolvable in integers, so it is not possible to tile the board in this way.