3,802 research outputs found
Searching Polyhedra by Rotating Half-Planes
The Searchlight Scheduling Problem was first studied in 2D polygons, where
the goal is for point guards in fixed positions to rotate searchlights to catch
an evasive intruder. Here the problem is extended to 3D polyhedra, with the
guards now boundary segments who rotate half-planes of illumination. After
carefully detailing the 3D model, several results are established. The first is
a nearly direct extension of the planar one-way sweep strategy using what we
call exhaustive guards, a generalization that succeeds despite there being no
well-defined notion in 3D of planar "clockwise rotation". Next follow two
results: every polyhedron with r>0 reflex edges can be searched by at most r^2
suitably placed guards, whereas just r guards suffice if the polyhedron is
orthogonal. (Minimizing the number of guards to search a given polyhedron is
easily seen to be NP-hard.) Finally we show that deciding whether a given set
of guards has a successful search schedule is strongly NP-hard, and that
deciding if a given target area is searchable at all is strongly PSPACE-hard,
even for orthogonal polyhedra. A number of peripheral results are proved en
route to these central theorems, and several open problems remain for future
work.Comment: 45 pages, 26 figure
Rigid ball-polyhedra in Euclidean 3-space
A ball-polyhedron is the intersection with non-empty interior of finitely
many (closed) unit balls in Euclidean 3-space. One can represent the boundary
of a ball-polyhedron as the union of vertices, edges, and faces defined in a
rather natural way. A ball-polyhedron is called a simple ball-polyhedron if at
every vertex exactly three edges meet. Moreover, a ball-polyhedron is called a
standard ball-polyhedron if its vertex-edge-face structure is a lattice (with
respect to containment). To each edge of a ball-polyhedron one can assign an
inner dihedral angle and say that the given ball-polyhedron is locally rigid
with respect to its inner dihedral angles if the vertex-edge-face structure of
the ball-polyhedron and its inner dihedral angles determine the ball-polyhedron
up to congruence locally. The main result of this paper is a Cauchy-type
rigidity theorem for ball-polyhedra stating that any simple and standard
ball-polyhedron is locally rigid with respect to its inner dihedral angles.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure
Perturbation of transportation polytopes
We describe a perturbation method that can be used to reduce the problem of
finding the multivariate generating function (MGF) of a non-simple polytope to
computing the MGF of simple polytopes. We then construct a perturbation that
works for any transportation polytope. We apply this perturbation to the family
of central transportation polytopes of order kn x n, and obtain formulas for
the MGFs of the feasible cone of each vertex of the polytope and the MGF of the
polytope. The formulas we obtain are enumerated by combinatorial objects. A
special case of the formulas recovers the results on Birkhoff polytopes given
by the author and De Loera and Yoshida. We also recover the formula for the
number of maximum vertices of transportation polytopes of order kn x n.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures. To appear in Journal of Combinatorial Theory
Ser.
Complexity of short Presburger arithmetic
We study complexity of short sentences in Presburger arithmetic (Short-PA).
Here by "short" we mean sentences with a bounded number of variables,
quantifiers, inequalities and Boolean operations; the input consists only of
the integers involved in the inequalities. We prove that assuming Kannan's
partition can be found in polynomial time, the satisfiability of Short-PA
sentences can be decided in polynomial time. Furthermore, under the same
assumption, we show that the numbers of satisfying assignments of short
Presburger sentences can also be computed in polynomial time
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