Pentomino

[1] Usually, video games such as Tetris imitations and Rampart consider mirror reflections to be distinct, and thus use the full set of 18 one-sided pentominoes.

[4] The earliest tilings of rectangles with a complete set of pentominoes appeared in the Problemist Fairy Chess Supplement in 1935, and further tiling problems were explored in the PFCS, and its successor, the Fairy Chess Review.

[5][6]: 127 Pentominoes were formally defined by American professor Solomon W. Golomb starting in 1953 and later in his 1965 book Polyominoes: Puzzles, Patterns, Problems, and Packings.

[1][7] They were introduced to the general public by Martin Gardner in his October 1965 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

A somewhat easier (more symmetrical) puzzle, the 8×8 rectangle with a 2×2 hole in the center, was solved by Dana Scott as far back as 1958.

Efficient algorithms have been described to solve such problems, for instance by Donald Knuth.

[11] Running on modern hardware, these pentomino puzzles can now be solved in mere seconds.

[14] Pentominoes, and similar shapes, are also the basis of a number of other tiling games, patterns and puzzles.

For example, the French board game Blokus is played with 4 colored sets of polyominoes, each consisting of every pentomino (12), tetromino (5), triomino (2) domino (1) and monomino (1).

[15] Parker Brothers released a multi-player pentomino board game called Universe in 1966.

Its theme is based on a deleted scene from the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey in which an astronaut is playing a two-player pentomino game against the HAL 9000 computer (a scene with a different astronaut playing chess was retained).

Pentominoes were featured in a prominent subplot of Arthur C. Clarke's 1975 novel Imperial Earth.

[16] They were also featured in Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer, which was published in 2003 and illustrated by Brett Helquist, as well as its sequels, The Wright 3 and The Calder Game.