Another boardgame in Le Monde mathematical puzzle :

Given an 8×8 chequerboard,  consider placing 2×2 tiles over this chequerboard until (a) the entire surface is covered and (b) removing a single 2×2 tile exposes some of the original chequerboard. What is the maximal number of 2×2 tiles one can set according to this scheme? And for a 10×10 chequerboard?

This puzzle reminded me of Wilfrid Kendall’s introduction to perfect sampling  with leaves seen through a ceiling window falling from above, until sky was no longer visible. The representation was used by Wilfrid to explain that coupling from the past did not need to go all the way back to infinity:

Defining a random coverage of the chequerboard by those 2×2 tiles amounts to selecting a random permutation þ of 1:(n-1)² and finding the subvector of þ producing a full coverage

 grid=matrix(0,n,n)
 path=sample(1:(n-1)^2) #random permutation
 path=path+((path-1)%/%(n-1)) #account for border shift
 i=1
 neigh=c(0,1,n,n+1)
 while (min(grid)==0){ #all entries covered
   grid[path[i]+neigh]=grid[path[i]+neigh]+1
   i=i+1
 }
 i=i-1

Then removing superfluous tiles:

for (k in sample(1:i)){
 krid=grid
 krid[path[k]+neigh]=krid[path[k]+neigh]-1
 if (min(krid)>0){ #off used below
   off[k]=FALSE; grid=krid} #useless tile
 }

And checking the remaining ones are truly essential:

mingrid=0
for (k in (1:i)[off]){
 krid=grid
 krid[path[k]+neigh]=krid[path[k]+neigh]-1
 mingrid=max(mingrid,min(krid))
 }
sky=(mingrid>0) #rejection of the grid

leads to the maximum number of tiles to be [at least] M=16,25,37,54 for n=6,8,10,12…