Drawing Arrangement Graphs In Small Grids, Or How To Play Planarity

We describe a linear-time algorithm that finds a planar drawing of every graph of a simple line or pseudoline arrangement within a grid of area O(n^{7/6}). No known input causes our algorithm to use area \Omega(n^{1+\epsilon}) for any \epsilon>0; finding such an input would represent significant progress on the famous k-set problem from discrete geometry. Drawing line arrangement graphs is the main task in the Planarity puzzle.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. To appear at 21st Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Bordeaux, 201

From Proximity to Utility: A Voronoi Partition of Pareto Optima

We present an extension of Voronoi diagrams where when considering which site a client is going to use, in addition to the site distances, other site attributes are also considered (for example, prices or weights). A cell in this diagram is then the locus of all clients that consider the same set of sites to be relevant. In particular, the precise site a client might use from this candidate set depends on parameters that might change between usages, and the candidate set lists all of the relevant sites. The resulting diagram is significantly more expressive than Voronoi diagrams, but naturally has the drawback that its complexity, even in the plane, might be quite high. Nevertheless, we show that if the attributes of the sites are drawn from the same distribution (note that the locations are fixed), then the expected complexity of the candidate diagram is near linear. To this end, we derive several new technical results, which are of independent interest. In particular, we provide a high-probability, asymptotically optimal bound on the number of Pareto optima points in a point set uniformly sampled from the $d$-dimensional hypercube. To do so we revisit the classical backward analysis technique, both simplifying and improving relevant results in order to achieve the high-probability bounds

On the Complexity of Randomly Weighted Voronoi Diagrams

In this paper, we provide an $O(n \mathrm{polylog} n)$ bound on the expected complexity of the randomly weighted Voronoi diagram of a set of $n$ sites in the plane, where the sites can be either points, interior-disjoint convex sets, or other more general objects. Here the randomness is on the weight of the sites, not their location. This compares favorably with the worst case complexity of these diagrams, which is quadratic. As a consequence we get an alternative proof to that of Agarwal etal [AHKS13] of the near linear complexity of the union of randomly expanded disjoint segments or convex sets (with an improved bound on the latter). The technique we develop is elegant and should be applicable to other problems

Computing largest circles separating two sets of segments

A circle $C$ separates two planar sets if it encloses one of the sets and its open interior disk does not meet the other set. A separating circle is a largest one if it cannot be locally increased while still separating the two given sets. An Theta(n log n) optimal algorithm is proposed to find all largest circles separating two given sets of line segments when line segments are allowed to meet only at their endpoints. In the general case, when line segments may intersect $\Omega(n^2)$ times, our algorithm can be adapted to work in O(n alpha(n) log n) time and O(n \alpha(n)) space, where alpha(n) represents the extremely slowly growing inverse of the Ackermann function.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, abstract presented at 8th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, 199

Convex-Arc Drawings of Pseudolines

A weak pseudoline arrangement is a topological generalization of a line arrangement, consisting of curves topologically equivalent to lines that cross each other at most once. We consider arrangements that are outerplanar---each crossing is incident to an unbounded face---and simple---each crossing point is the crossing of only two curves. We show that these arrangements can be represented by chords of a circle, by convex polygonal chains with only two bends, or by hyperbolic lines. Simple but non-outerplanar arrangements (non-weak) can be represented by convex polygonal chains or convex smooth curves of linear complexity.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures. A preliminary announcement of these results was made as a poster at the 21st International Symposium on Graph Drawing, Bordeaux, France, September 2013, and published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8242, Springer, 2013, pp. 522--52