Computational Geometry Column 41

The recent result that n congruent balls in R^d have at most 4 distinct geometric permutations is described.Comment: To appear in SIGACT News and in Internat. J. Comput. Geom. App

Heterochromatic Higher Order Transversals for Convex Sets

In this short paper, we show that if $\left\{\mathcal{F}_{n}\right\}_{n \in \mathbb{N}}$ be a collection of families compact $(r, R)$-fat convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ and if every heterochromatic sequence with respect to $\left\{\mathcal{F}_{n}\right\}_{n \in \mathbb{N}}$ contains $k+2$ convex sets that can be pierced by a $k$-flat then there exists a family $\mathcal{F}_{m}$ from the collection that can be pierced by finitely many $k$-flats. Additionally, we show that if $\left\{\mathcal{F}_{n}\right\}_{n \in \mathbb{N}}$ be a collection of families of compact convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ where each $\mathcal{F}_{n}$ is a family of closed balls (axis parallel boxes) in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ and every heterochromatic sequence with respect to $\left\{\mathcal{F}_{n}\right\}_{n \in \mathbb{N}}$ contains $2$ intersecting closed balls (boxes) then there exists a family $\mathcal{F}_{m}$ from the collection that can be pierced by a finite number of points from $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. To complement the above results, we also establish some impossibility of proving similar results for other more general families of convex sets. Our results are a generalization of $(\aleph_0,k+2)$-Theorem for $k$-transversals of convex sets by Keller and Perles (Symposium on Computational Geometry 2022), and can also be seen as a colorful infinite variant of $(p,q)$-Theorems of Alon and Klietman (Advances in Mathematics 1992), and Alon and Kalai (Discrete & Computational Geometry 1995).Comment: 16 pages and 5 figures. Section 3 rewritte

QPTAS for Weighted Geometric Set Cover on Pseudodisks and Halfspaces

International audienceWeighted geometric set-cover problems arise naturally in several geometric and non-geometric settings (e.g. the breakthrough of Bansal and Pruhs (FOCS 2010) reduces a wide class of machine scheduling problems to weighted geometric set-cover). More than two decades of research has succeeded in settling the (1 + status for most geometric set-cover problems, except for some basic scenarios which are still lacking. One is that of weighted disks in the plane for which, after a series of papers, Varadarajan (STOC 2010) presented a clever quasi-sampling technique, which together with improvements by Chan et al. (SODA 2012), yielded an O(1)-approximation algorithm. Even for the unweighted case, a PTAS for a fundamental class of objects called pseudodisks (which includes half-spaces, disks, unit-height rectangles, translates of convex sets etc.) is currently unknown. Another fundamental case is weighted halfspaces in R 3 , for which a PTAS is currently lacking. In this paper, we present a QPTAS for all of these remaining problems. Our results are based on the separator framework of Adamaszek and Wiese (FOCS 2013, SODA 2014), who recently obtained a QPTAS for weighted independent set of polygonal regions. This rules out the possibility that these problems are APX-hard, assuming NP DTIME(2 polylog(n)). Together with the recent work of Chan and Grant (CGTA 2014), this settles the APX-hardness status for all natural geometric set-cover problems

Packing and covering with balls on Busemann surfaces

In this note we prove that for any compact subset $S$ of a Busemann surface $({\mathcal S},d)$ (in particular, for any simple polygon with geodesic metric) and any positive number $\delta$, the minimum number of closed balls of radius $\delta$ with centers at $\mathcal S$ and covering the set $S$ is at most 19 times the maximum number of disjoint closed balls of radius $\delta$ centered at points of $S$: $\nu(S) \le \rho(S) \le 19\nu(S)$, where $\rho(S)$ and $\nu(S)$ are the covering and the packing numbers of $S$ by ${\delta}$-balls.Comment: 27 page