22 research outputs found
Happy endings for flip graphs
We show that the triangulations of a finite point set form a flip graph that
can be embedded isometrically into a hypercube, if and only if the point set
has no empty convex pentagon. Point sets of this type include convex subsets of
lattices, points on two lines, and several other infinite families. As a
consequence, flip distance in such point sets can be computed efficiently.Comment: 26 pages, 15 figures. Revised and expanded for journal publicatio
Empty pentagons in point sets with collinearities
An empty pentagon in a point set P in the plane is a set of five points in P
in strictly convex position with no other point of P in their convex hull. We
prove that every finite set of at least 328k^2 points in the plane contains an
empty pentagon or k collinear points. This is optimal up to a constant factor
since the (k-1)x(k-1) grid contains no empty pentagon and no k collinear
points. The previous best known bound was doubly exponential.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure
A Note on Flips in Diagonal Rectangulations
Rectangulations are partitions of a square into axis-aligned rectangles. A
number of results provide bijections between combinatorial equivalence classes
of rectangulations and families of pattern-avoiding permutations. Other results
deal with local changes involving a single edge of a rectangulation, referred
to as flips, edge rotations, or edge pivoting. Such operations induce a graph
on equivalence classes of rectangulations, related to so-called flip graphs on
triangulations and other families of geometric partitions. In this note, we
consider a family of flip operations on the equivalence classes of diagonal
rectangulations, and their interpretation as transpositions in the associated
Baxter permutations, avoiding the vincular patterns { 3{14}2, 2{41}3 }. This
complements results from Law and Reading (JCTA, 2012) and provides a complete
characterization of flip operations on diagonal rectangulations, in both
geometric and combinatorial terms
Flip Graphs of Degree-Bounded (Pseudo-)Triangulations
We study flip graphs of triangulations whose maximum vertex degree is bounded
by a constant . In particular, we consider triangulations of sets of
points in convex position in the plane and prove that their flip graph is
connected if and only if ; the diameter of the flip graph is .
We also show that, for general point sets, flip graphs of pointed
pseudo-triangulations can be disconnected for , and flip graphs of
triangulations can be disconnected for any . Additionally, we consider a
relaxed version of the original problem. We allow the violation of the degree
bound by a small constant. Any two triangulations with maximum degree at
most of a convex point set are connected in the flip graph by a path of
length , where every intermediate triangulation has maximum degree
at most .Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, acknowledgments update
Flip Distance Between Two Triangulations of a Point-Set is NP-complete
Given two triangulations of a convex polygon, computing the minimum number of
flips required to transform one to the other is a long-standing open problem.
It is not known whether the problem is in P or NP-complete. We prove that two
natural generalizations of the problem are NP-complete, namely computing the
minimum number of flips between two triangulations of (1) a polygon with holes;
(2) a set of points in the plane
Flip Distance Between Triangulations of a Simple Polygon is NP-Complete
Let T be a triangulation of a simple polygon. A flip in T is the operation of
removing one diagonal of T and adding a different one such that the resulting
graph is again a triangulation. The flip distance between two triangulations is
the smallest number of flips required to transform one triangulation into the
other. For the special case of convex polygons, the problem of determining the
shortest flip distance between two triangulations is equivalent to determining
the rotation distance between two binary trees, a central problem which is
still open after over 25 years of intensive study. We show that computing the
flip distance between two triangulations of a simple polygon is NP-complete.
This complements a recent result that shows APX-hardness of determining the
flip distance between two triangulations of a planar point set.Comment: Accepted versio
Recognizing Partial Cubes in Quadratic Time
We show how to test whether a graph with n vertices and m edges is a partial
cube, and if so how to find a distance-preserving embedding of the graph into a
hypercube, in the near-optimal time bound O(n^2), improving previous O(nm)-time
solutions.Comment: 25 pages, five figures. This version significantly expands previous
versions, including a new report on an implementation of the algorithm and
experiments with i
Every Large Point Set contains Many Collinear Points or an Empty Pentagon
We prove the following generalised empty pentagon theorem: for every integer
, every sufficiently large set of points in the plane contains
collinear points or an empty pentagon. As an application, we settle the
next open case of the "big line or big clique" conjecture of K\'ara, P\'or, and
Wood [\emph{Discrete Comput. Geom.} 34(3):497--506, 2005]
Flip Distance Between Triangulations of a Planar Point Set is APX-Hard
In this work we consider triangulations of point sets in the Euclidean plane,
i.e., maximal straight-line crossing-free graphs on a finite set of points.
Given a triangulation of a point set, an edge flip is the operation of removing
one edge and adding another one, such that the resulting graph is again a
triangulation. Flips are a major way of locally transforming triangular meshes.
We show that, given a point set in the Euclidean plane and two
triangulations and of , it is an APX-hard problem to minimize
the number of edge flips to transform to .Comment: A previous version only showed NP-completeness of the corresponding
decision problem. The current version is the one of the accepted manuscrip