1. What is Alhambra?
Alhambra is a Java API designed to allow you to experiment with mathematical tilings, also known as tessellations. There is an application built on top of the API to construct tilings interactively using a mouse - a bit like doing a jigsaw. The API is designed to allow you to write your own tiles easily, see the sample Jython scripts for a demonstration. Alhambra can also be used non-graphically, for example I have written a Genetic Algorithm that learns to tile a plane efficiently given some prototiles.
2. Why is it called Alhambra?
The Moorish palace, Alhambra, in Granada, Spain is covered in tilings and patterns. I visited in July 1998 and started writing a tiling program shortly afterwards. Have a look at the slide show of photographs from the real Alhambra.
3. What do I need to run Alhambra?
Alhambra is written purely in Java, so you will need a Java 2 runtime.
4. Can I use Alhambra from a browser?
Not any more. I have written an applet but it is unsupported now since I can't keep up with the browsers and their level of Java support, and would rather spend time improving the code. You can try to use the applet code if you wish, but it will probably need some tweaking to get it to run.
5. How do I write my own tiles?
You need to implement the org.tiling.Tile interface. This is most
simply done by subclassing org.tiling.SimpleTile, and the easiest way to
do this is using Jython, as Jython is embedded in Alhambra.
See the sample scripts for more details.
6. What can I do with Alhambra if I don't want to write any code?
You can play with the tiles that come with Alhambra. Currently Alhambra comes with Penrose tiles, a selection of polyominoes (including the Ammann set of aperiodic polyominoes popularised by Penrose), Goodman-Strauss' aperiodic trilobite and cross, regular polygons, and some irregular pentagons.
7. Can I print tilings?
Yes, there's a Print option. And it works well in Windows and Linux, at least. Under Linux you can also print to a file in PostScript format.