Improved Bounds for Drawing Trees on Fixed Points with L-shaped Edges

Let $T$ be an $n$-node tree of maximum degree 4, and let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in the plane with no two points on the same horizontal or vertical line. It is an open question whether $T$ always has a planar drawing on $P$ such that each edge is drawn as an orthogonal path with one bend (an "L-shaped" edge). By giving new methods for drawing trees, we improve the bounds on the size of the point set $P$ for which such drawings are possible to: $O(n^{1.55})$ for maximum degree 4 trees; $O(n^{1.22})$ for maximum degree 3 (binary) trees; and $O(n^{1.142})$ for perfect binary trees. Drawing ordered trees with L-shaped edges is harder---we give an example that cannot be done and a bound of $O(n \log n)$ points for L-shaped drawings of ordered caterpillars, which contrasts with the known linear bound for unordered caterpillars.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

On L-shaped point set embeddings of trees : first non-embeddable examples

An L-shaped embedding of a tree in a point set is a planar drawing of the tree where the vertices are mapped to distinct points and every edge is drawn as a sequence of two axis-aligned line segments. There has been considerable work on establishing upper bounds on the minimum cardinality of a point set to guarantee that any tree of the same size with maximum degree 4 admits an L-shaped embedding on the point set. However, no non-trivial lower bound is known to this date, i.e., no known n-vertex tree requires more than n points to be embedded. In this paper, we present the first examples of n-vertex trees for n∈{13,14,16,17,18,19,20} that require strictly more points than vertices to admit an L-shaped embedding. Moreover, using computer help, we show that every tree on n≤12 vertices admits an L-shaped embedding in every set of n points. We also consider embedding ordered trees, where the cyclic order of the neighbors of each vertex in the embedding is prescribed. For this setting, we determine the smallest non-embeddable ordered tree on n=10 vertices, and we show that every ordered tree on n≤9 or n=11 vertices admits an L-shaped embedding in every set of n points. We also construct an infinite family of ordered trees which do not always admit an L-shaped embedding, answering a question raised by Biedl, Chan, Derka, Jain, and Lubiw

Hamiltonian orthogeodesic alternating paths

AbstractLet R be a set of red points and let B be a set of blue points. The point set P=R∪B is called equitable if ||B|−|R||⩽1 and it is called general if no two points are vertically or horizontally aligned. An orthogeodesic alternating path on P is a path such that each edge is an orthogeodesic chain connecting points of different color and such that no two edges cross. We consider the problem of deciding whether a set of red and blue points admits a Hamiltonian orthogeodesic alternating path, that is, an orthogeodesic alternating path visiting all points. We prove that every general equitable point set admits a Hamiltonian orthogeodesic alternating path and we present an O(nlog2n)-time algorithm for finding such a path, where n is the number of points. On the other hand, we show that the problem is NP-complete if the path must be on the grid (i.e., vertices and bends have integer coordinates). Further, we show that we can approximate the maximum length of an orthogeodesic alternating path on the grid by a factor of 3, whereas we present a family of point sets with n points that do not have a Hamiltonian orthogeodesic alternating path with more than n/2+2 points. Additionally, we show that it is NP-complete to decide whether a given set of red and blue points on the grid admits an orthogeodesic perfect matching if horizontally aligned points are allowed. This contrasts a recent result by Kano (2009) [9] who showed that this is possible on every general point set

Ordered Level Planarity, Geodesic Planarity and Bi-Monotonicity

We introduce and study the problem Ordered Level Planarity which asks for a planar drawing of a graph such that vertices are placed at prescribed positions in the plane and such that every edge is realized as a y-monotone curve. This can be interpreted as a variant of Level Planarity in which the vertices on each level appear in a prescribed total order. We establish a complexity dichotomy with respect to both the maximum degree and the level-width, that is, the maximum number of vertices that share a level. Our study of Ordered Level Planarity is motivated by connections to several other graph drawing problems. Geodesic Planarity asks for a planar drawing of a graph such that vertices are placed at prescribed positions in the plane and such that every edge is realized as a polygonal path composed of line segments with two adjacent directions from a given set $S$ of directions symmetric with respect to the origin. Our results on Ordered Level Planarity imply $NP$-hardness for any $S$ with $|S|\ge 4$ even if the given graph is a matching. Katz, Krug, Rutter and Wolff claimed that for matchings Manhattan Geodesic Planarity, the case where $S$ contains precisely the horizontal and vertical directions, can be solved in polynomial time [GD'09]. Our results imply that this is incorrect unless $P=NP$. Our reduction extends to settle the complexity of the Bi-Monotonicity problem, which was proposed by Fulek, Pelsmajer, Schaefer and \v{S}tefankovi\v{c}. Ordered Level Planarity turns out to be a special case of T-Level Planarity, Clustered Level Planarity and Constrained Level Planarity. Thus, our results strengthen previous hardness results. In particular, our reduction to Clustered Level Planarity generates instances with only two non-trivial clusters. This answers a question posed by Angelini, Da Lozzo, Di Battista, Frati and Roselli.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Rollercoasters and Caterpillars

A rollercoaster is a sequence of real numbers for which every maximal contiguous subsequence - increasing or decreasing - has length at least three. By translating this sequence to a set of points in the plane, a rollercoaster can be defined as an x-monotone polygonal path for which every maximal sub-path, with positive- or negative-slope edges, has at least three vertices. Given a sequence of distinct real numbers, the rollercoaster problem asks for a maximum-length (not necessarily contiguous) subsequence that is a rollercoaster. It was conjectured that every sequence of n distinct real numbers contains a rollercoaster of length at least ceil[n/2] for n>7, while the best known lower bound is Omega(n/log n). In this paper we prove this conjecture. Our proof is constructive and implies a linear-time algorithm for computing a rollercoaster of this length. Extending the O(n log n)-time algorithm for computing a longest increasing subsequence, we show how to compute a maximum-length rollercoaster within the same time bound. A maximum-length rollercoaster in a permutation of {1,...,n} can be computed in O(n log log n) time. The search for rollercoasters was motivated by orthogeodesic point-set embedding of caterpillars. A caterpillar is a tree such that deleting the leaves gives a path, called the spine. A top-view caterpillar is one of maximum degree 4 such that the two leaves adjacent to each vertex lie on opposite sides of the spine. As an application of our result on rollercoasters, we are able to find a planar drawing of every n-vertex top-view caterpillar on every set of 25/3(n+4) points in the plane, such that each edge is an orthogonal path with one bend. This improves the previous best known upper bound on the number of required points, which is O(n log n). We also show that such a drawing can be obtained in linear time, when the points are given in sorted order

On Embeddability of Buses in Point Sets

Set membership of points in the plane can be visualized by connecting corresponding points via graphical features, like paths, trees, polygons, ellipses. In this paper we study the \emph{bus embeddability problem} (BEP): given a set of colored points we ask whether there exists a planar realization with one horizontal straight-line segment per color, called bus, such that all points with the same color are connected with vertical line segments to their bus. We present an ILP and an FPT algorithm for the general problem. For restricted versions of this problem, such as when the relative order of buses is predefined, or when a bus must be placed above all its points, we provide efficient algorithms. We show that another restricted version of the problem can be solved using 2-stack pushall sorting. On the negative side we prove the NP-completeness of a special case of BEP.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, conference version at GD 201

Quantifying some properties of curves and arcs on hyperbolic surfaces

Motivated by the ergodicity of geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of a closed hyperbolic surface and its applications, this thesis includes three parts: Part 1. We present a type of quantitative density of closed geodesics and orthogeodesics on complete finite-area hyperbolic surfaces. The main results are upper bounds on the length of the shortest closed geodesic and the shortest doubly truncated orthogeodesic that are Y-dense on a given compact set on the surface. Part 2. We investigate the terms arising in Luo-Tan’s identity, namely showing that they vary monotonically in terms of lengths and that they verify certain convexity properties. Using these properties, we deduce two results. As a first application, we show how to deduce a theorem of Thurston which states, in particular for closed hyperbolic surfaces, that if a simple length spectrum "dominates" another, then in fact the two surfaces are isometric. As a second application, we show how to find upper bounds on the number of pairs of pants of bounded length that only depend on the boundary length and the topology of the surface. This is joint work with Hugo Parlier and Ser Peow Tan. Part 3. Inspired by a number theoretic application of Bridgeman’s identity, the combinatorial proof of McShane’s identity by Bowditch and its generalized version by Labourie and Tan, we describe a tree structure on the set of orthogeodesics and give a combinatorial proof of Basmajian’s identity in the case of surfaces. We also introduce the notion of orthoshapes with associated identity relations and indicate connections to length equivalent orthogeodesics and a type of Cayley-Menger determinant. As another application, dilogarithm identities following from Bridgeman’s identity are computed recursively and their terms are indexed by the Farey sequence