Our original interest in this puzzle was sparked by Persi Diaconis and Susan Holmes, who enthusiastically relayed the developing work of Reviel Netz, a brilliant young mathematical historian also at Stanford who is well known for his research on Archimedes. Over the subsequent weeks after hearing about this subject, we all spent endless hours shuffling the Stomachion pieces (kindly supplied by George Miller) into various configurations in order to get some feeling for what might be true. Bill Cutler was the first to succeed in counting (by computer) the number of distinct tilings of the square. Without his efforts, we would never have been sure of our hand calculations! If the original square is placed on a 12 x 12 integer lattice in the plane, is it true that in any tiling of the square, every vertex of every tile is on an integer lattice point? This is something that Bill Cutler had already discovered empirically. One could well ask what is special about the Stomachion tiles that makes this true. It certainly isn't true for arbitrary tiles of the square by polygonal tiles. We hope that the STOMACH graph on this website help stimulate more thoughts (and results) on this intriguing combinatorial puzzle.

Although we had been playing with STOMACH and Stomachion tilings for many weeks, this website was only set up at the end of November in a rush --- two days just before Ron's trip to England. The thousands of files in the site might contain more imperfections than we suspect.

We will follow the strategy of Don Knuth. If you are the first person to report a bona-fide error, you are eligible for a reward of $2.56. The second person reporting the same error will get $1.28, and so on. Although the amount is finite, our gratitude is unbounded.