30 research outputs found
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
Polychromatic Coloring for Half-Planes
We prove that for every integer , every finite set of points in the plane
can be -colored so that every half-plane that contains at least
points, also contains at least one point from every color class. We also show
that the bound is best possible. This improves the best previously known
lower and upper bounds of and respectively. We also show
that every finite set of half-planes can be colored so that if a point
belongs to a subset of at least of the half-planes then
contains a half-plane from every color class. This improves the best previously
known upper bound of . Another corollary of our first result is a new
proof of the existence of small size \eps-nets for points in the plane with
respect to half-planes.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
Colorful Strips
Given a planar point set and an integer , we wish to color the points with
colors so that any axis-aligned strip containing enough points contains all
colors. The goal is to bound the necessary size of such a strip, as a function
of . We show that if the strip size is at least , such a coloring
can always be found. We prove that the size of the strip is also bounded in any
fixed number of dimensions. In contrast to the planar case, we show that
deciding whether a 3D point set can be 2-colored so that any strip containing
at least three points contains both colors is NP-complete.
We also consider the problem of coloring a given set of axis-aligned strips,
so that any sufficiently covered point in the plane is covered by colors.
We show that in dimensions the required coverage is at most .
Lower bounds are given for the two problems. This complements recent
impossibility results on decomposition of strip coverings with arbitrary
orientations. Finally, we study a variant where strips are replaced by wedges
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
Multiple coverings with closed polygons
A planar set is said to be cover-decomposable if there is a constant
such that every -fold covering of the plane with translates of
can be decomposed into two coverings. It is known that open convex polygons are
cover-decomposable. Here we show that closed, centrally symmetric convex
polygons are also cover-decomposable. We also show that an infinite-fold
covering of the plane with translates of can be decomposed into two
infinite-fold coverings. Both results hold for coverings of any subset of the
plane.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1009.4641 by other author
Octants are cover-decomposable into many coverings
We prove that octants are cover-decomposable into multiple coverings, i.e., for any k there is an m(k)m(k) such that any m(k)m(k)-fold covering of any subset of the space with a finite number of translates of a given octant can be decomposed into k coverings. As a corollary, we obtain that any m(k)m(k)-fold covering of any subset of the plane with a finite number of homothetic copies of a given triangle can be decomposed into k coverings. Previously only some weaker bounds were known for related problems [20]
Coloring axis-parallel rectangles
AbstractFor every k and r, we construct a finite family of axis-parallel rectangles in the plane such that no matter how we color them with k colors, there exists a point covered by precisely r members of the family, all of which have the same color. For r=2, this answers a question of S. Smorodinsky [S. Smorodinsky, On the chromatic number of some geometric hypergraphs, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 21 (2007) 676–687]