19,712 research outputs found
Drawing graphs with vertices and edges in convex position
A graph has strong convex dimension , if it admits a straight-line drawing
in the plane such that its vertices are in convex position and the midpoints of
its edges are also in convex position. Halman, Onn, and Rothblum conjectured
that graphs of strong convex dimension are planar and therefore have at
most edges. We prove that all such graphs have at most edges
while on the other hand we present a class of non-planar graphs of strong
convex dimension . We also give lower bounds on the maximum number of edges
a graph of strong convex dimension can have and discuss variants of this
graph class. We apply our results to questions about large convexly independent
sets in Minkowski sums of planar point sets, that have been of interest in
recent years.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, improved expositio
Inapproximability of the independent set polynomial in the complex plane
We study the complexity of approximating the independent set polynomial
of a graph with maximum degree when the activity
is a complex number.
This problem is already well understood when is real using
connections to the -regular tree . The key concept in that case is
the "occupation ratio" of the tree . This ratio is the contribution to
from independent sets containing the root of the tree, divided
by itself. If is such that the occupation ratio
converges to a limit, as the height of grows, then there is an FPTAS for
approximating on a graph with maximum degree .
Otherwise, the approximation problem is NP-hard.
Unsurprisingly, the case where is complex is more challenging.
Peters and Regts identified the complex values of for which the
occupation ratio of the -regular tree converges. These values carve a
cardioid-shaped region in the complex plane. Motivated by the
picture in the real case, they asked whether marks the true
approximability threshold for general complex values .
Our main result shows that for every outside of ,
the problem of approximating on graphs with maximum degree
at most is indeed NP-hard. In fact, when is outside of
and is not a positive real number, we give the stronger result
that approximating is actually #P-hard. If is a
negative real number outside of , we show that it is #P-hard to
even decide whether , resolving in the affirmative a conjecture
of Harvey, Srivastava and Vondrak.
Our proof techniques are based around tools from complex analysis -
specifically the study of iterative multivariate rational maps
Maximum Scatter TSP in Doubling Metrics
We study the problem of finding a tour of points in which every edge is
long. More precisely, we wish to find a tour that visits every point exactly
once, maximizing the length of the shortest edge in the tour. The problem is
known as Maximum Scatter TSP, and was introduced by Arkin et al. (SODA 1997),
motivated by applications in manufacturing and medical imaging. Arkin et al.
gave a -approximation for the metric version of the problem and showed
that this is the best possible ratio achievable in polynomial time (assuming ). Arkin et al. raised the question of whether a better approximation
ratio can be obtained in the Euclidean plane.
We answer this question in the affirmative in a more general setting, by
giving a -approximation algorithm for -dimensional doubling
metrics, with running time , where . As a corollary we obtain (i) an
efficient polynomial-time approximation scheme (EPTAS) for all constant
dimensions , (ii) a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for
dimension , for a sufficiently large constant , and (iii)
a PTAS for constant and . Furthermore, we
show the dependence on in our approximation scheme to be essentially
optimal, unless Satisfiability can be solved in subexponential time
Spontaneous magnetisation in the plane
The Arak process is a solvable stochastic process which generates coloured
patterns in the plane. Patterns are made up of a variable number of random
non-intersecting polygons. We show that the distribution of Arak process states
is the Gibbs distribution of its states in thermodynamic equilibrium in the
grand canonical ensemble. The sequence of Gibbs distributions form a new model
parameterised by temperature. We prove that there is a phase transition in this
model, for some non-zero temperature. We illustrate this conclusion with
simulation results. We measure the critical exponents of this off-lattice model
and find they are consistent with those of the Ising model in two dimensions.Comment: 23 pages numbered -1,0...21, 8 figure
A QPTAS for Maximum Weight Independent Set of Polygons with Polylogarithmically Many Vertices
The Maximum Weight Independent Set of Polygons problem is a fundamental
problem in computational geometry. Given a set of weighted polygons in the
2-dimensional plane, the goal is to find a set of pairwise non-overlapping
polygons with maximum total weight. Due to its wide range of applications, the
MWISP problem and its special cases have been extensively studied both in the
approximation algorithms and the computational geometry community. Despite a
lot of research, its general case is not well-understood. Currently the best
known polynomial time algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of n^(epsilon)
[Fox and Pach, SODA 2011], and it is not even clear whether the problem is
APX-hard. We present a (1+epsilon)-approximation algorithm, assuming that each
polygon in the input has at most a polylogarithmic number of vertices. Our
algorithm has quasi-polynomial running time.
We use a recently introduced framework for approximating maximum weight
independent set in geometric intersection graphs. The framework has been used
to construct a QPTAS in the much simpler case of axis-parallel rectangles. We
extend it in two ways, to adapt it to our much more general setting. First, we
show that its technical core can be reduced to the case when all input polygons
are triangles. Secondly, we replace its key technical ingredient which is a
method to partition the plane using only few edges such that the objects
stemming from the optimal solution are evenly distributed among the resulting
faces and each object is intersected only a few times. Our new procedure for
this task is not more complex than the original one, and it can handle the
arising difficulties due to the arbitrary angles of the polygons. Note that
already this obstacle makes the known analysis for the above framework fail.
Also, in general it is not well understood how to handle this difficulty by
efficient approximation algorithms
An Algorithm for the Graph Crossing Number Problem
We study the Minimum Crossing Number problem: given an -vertex graph ,
the goal is to find a drawing of in the plane with minimum number of edge
crossings. This is one of the central problems in topological graph theory,
that has been studied extensively over the past three decades. The first
non-trivial efficient algorithm for the problem, due to Leighton and Rao,
achieved an -approximation for bounded degree graphs. This
algorithm has since been improved by poly-logarithmic factors, with the best
current approximation ratio standing on O(n \poly(d) \log^{3/2}n) for graphs
with maximum degree . In contrast, only APX-hardness is known on the
negative side.
In this paper we present an efficient randomized algorithm to find a drawing
of any -vertex graph in the plane with O(OPT^{10}\cdot \poly(d \log
n)) crossings, where is the number of crossings in the optimal solution,
and is the maximum vertex degree in . This result implies an
\tilde{O}(n^{9/10} \poly(d))-approximation for Minimum Crossing Number, thus
breaking the long-standing -approximation barrier for
bounded-degree graphs
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