Schattschneider's problem can first be stated for a tiling of squares.
This is symmetric under the group generated by translations
,
, the rotation by
given by
and the reflection
.
Suppose we have a collection of four figures
,
,
and
which are pictures to place on a square. How many ways can we assign
one of these four to all the squares in the tiling in such a way that
the assignment is invariant under the translations generated by
and
? We say two assignments
are the same if we can apply one of the symmetries of the square
tiling to one assignment and obtain the other.
This is trickier than it sounds, because it depends on the relations between the four figures, i.e. whether or not some of them are rotations or reflections of the other.