25 research outputs found
Making Octants Colorful and Related Covering Decomposition Problems
We give new positive results on the long-standing open problem of geometric
covering decomposition for homothetic polygons. In particular, we prove that
for any positive integer k, every finite set of points in R^3 can be colored
with k colors so that every translate of the negative octant containing at
least k^6 points contains at least one of each color. The best previously known
bound was doubly exponential in k. This yields, among other corollaries, the
first polynomial bound for the decomposability of multiple coverings by
homothetic triangles. We also investigate related decomposition problems
involving intervals appearing on a line. We prove that no algorithm can
dynamically maintain a decomposition of a multiple covering by intervals under
insertion of new intervals, even in a semi-online model, in which some coloring
decisions can be delayed. This implies that a wide range of sweeping plane
algorithms cannot guarantee any bound even for special cases of the octant
problem.Comment: version after revision process; minor changes in the expositio
Making Triangles Colorful
We prove that for any point set P in the plane, a triangle T, and a positive
integer k, there exists a coloring of P with k colors such that any homothetic
copy of T containing at least ck^8 points of P, for some constant c, contains
at least one of each color. This is the first polynomial bound for range spaces
induced by homothetic polygons. The only previously known bound for this
problem applies to the more general case of octants in R^3, but is doubly
exponential.Comment: 6 page
More on Decomposing Coverings by Octants
In this note we improve our upper bound given earlier by showing that every
9-fold covering of a point set in the space by finitely many translates of an
octant decomposes into two coverings, and our lower bound by a construction for
a 4-fold covering that does not decompose into two coverings. The same bounds
also hold for coverings of points in by finitely many homothets or
translates of a triangle. We also prove that certain dynamic interval coloring
problems are equivalent to the above question
Convex Polygons are Self-Coverable
We introduce a new notion for geometric families called self-coverability and
show that homothets of convex polygons are self-coverable. As a corollary, we
obtain several results about coloring point sets such that any member of the
family with many points contains all colors. This is dual (and in some cases
equivalent) to the much investigated cover-decomposability problem
Unsplittable coverings in the plane
A system of sets forms an {\em -fold covering} of a set if every point
of belongs to at least of its members. A -fold covering is called a
{\em covering}. The problem of splitting multiple coverings into several
coverings was motivated by classical density estimates for {\em sphere
packings} as well as by the {\em planar sensor cover problem}. It has been the
prevailing conjecture for 35 years (settled in many special cases) that for
every plane convex body , there exists a constant such that every
-fold covering of the plane with translates of splits into
coverings. In the present paper, it is proved that this conjecture is false for
the unit disk. The proof can be generalized to construct, for every , an
unsplittable -fold covering of the plane with translates of any open convex
body which has a smooth boundary with everywhere {\em positive curvature}.
Somewhat surprisingly, {\em unbounded} open convex sets do not misbehave,
they satisfy the conjecture: every -fold covering of any region of the plane
by translates of such a set splits into two coverings. To establish this
result, we prove a general coloring theorem for hypergraphs of a special type:
{\em shift-chains}. We also show that there is a constant such that, for
any positive integer , every -fold covering of a region with unit disks
splits into two coverings, provided that every point is covered by {\em at
most} sets
Online and quasi-online colorings of wedges and intervals
We consider proper online colorings of hypergraphs defined by geometric
regions. We prove that there is an online coloring algorithm that colors
intervals of the real line using colors such that for every
point , contained in at least intervals, not all the intervals
containing have the same color. We also prove the corresponding result
about online coloring a family of wedges (quadrants) in the plane that are the
translates of a given fixed wedge. These results contrast the results of the
first and third author showing that in the quasi-online setting 12 colors are
enough to color wedges (independent of and ). We also consider
quasi-online coloring of intervals. In all cases we present efficient coloring
algorithms
Proper Coloring of Geometric Hypergraphs
We study whether for a given planar family F there is an m such that any finite set of points can be 3-colored so that anymember ofF that contains at leastm points contains two points with different colors. We conjecture that if F is a family of pseudo-disks, then such an m exists. We prove this in the special case when F is the family of all homothetic copies of a given convex polygon. We also study the problem in higher dimensions
Coloring Points with Respect to Squares
We consider the problem of 2-coloring geometric hypergraphs. Specifically, we show that there is a constant m such that any finite set of points in the plane (Formula presented.) can be 2-colored such that every axis-parallel square that contains at least m points from (Formula presented.) contains points of both colors. Our proof is constructive, that is, it provides a polynomial-time algorithm for obtaining such a 2-coloring. By affine transformations this result immediately applies also when considering 2-coloring points with respect to homothets of a fixed parallelogram
Survey on Decomposition of Multiple Coverings
The study of multiple coverings was initiated by Davenport and L. Fejes Tóth more than 50 years ago. In 1980 and 1986, the rst named author published the rst papers about decompos-ability of multiple coverings. It was discovered much later that, besides its theoretical interest, this area has practical applications to sensor networks. Now there is a lot of activity in this eld with several breakthrough results, although, many basic questions are still unsolved. In this survey, we outline the most important results, methods, and questions. 1 Cover-decomposability and the sensor cover problem Let P = { Pi | i ∈ I} be a collection of sets in Rd. We say that P is an m-fold covering if every point of Rd is contained in at least m members of P. The largest such m is called the thickness of the covering. A 1-fold covering is simply called a covering. To formulate the central question of this survey succinctly, we need a denition. Denition 1.1. A planar set P is said to be cover-decomposable if there exists a (minimal) constant m = m(P) such that every m-fold covering of the plane with translates of P can be decomposed into two coverings. Note that the above term is slightly misleading: we decompose (partition) not the set P, but a collection P of its translates. Such a partition is sometimes regarded a coloring of the members of P
An abstract approach to polychromatic coloring: shallow hitting sets in ABA-free hypergraphs and pseudohalfplanes
The goal of this paper is to give a new, abstract approach to
cover-decomposition and polychromatic colorings using hypergraphs on ordered
vertex sets. We introduce an abstract version of a framework by Smorodinsky and
Yuditsky, used for polychromatic coloring halfplanes, and apply it to so-called
ABA-free hypergraphs, which are a generalization of interval graphs. Using our
methods, we prove that (2k-1)-uniform ABA-free hypergraphs have a polychromatic
k-coloring, a problem posed by the second author. We also prove the same for
hypergraphs defined on a point set by pseudohalfplanes. These results are best
possible. We could only prove slightly weaker results for dual hypergraphs
defined by pseudohalfplanes, and for hypergraphs defined by pseudohemispheres.
We also introduce another new notion that seems to be important for
investigating polychromatic colorings and epsilon-nets, shallow hitting sets.
We show that all the above hypergraphs have shallow hitting sets, if their
hyperedges are containment-free