52 research outputs found
On Strong Centerpoints
Let be a set of points in and be a
family of geometric objects. We call a point a strong centerpoint of
w.r.t if is contained in all that
contains more than points from , where is a fixed constant. A
strong centerpoint does not exist even when is the family of
halfspaces in the plane. We prove the existence of strong centerpoints with
exact constants for convex polytopes defined by a fixed set of orientations. We
also prove the existence of strong centerpoints for abstract set systems with
bounded intersection
Small Strong Epsilon Nets
Let P be a set of n points in . A point x is said to be a
centerpoint of P if x is contained in every convex object that contains more
than points of P. We call a point x a strong centerpoint for a
family of objects if is contained in every object that contains more than a constant fraction of points of P. A
strong centerpoint does not exist even for halfspaces in . We
prove that a strong centerpoint exists for axis-parallel boxes in
and give exact bounds. We then extend this to small strong
-nets in the plane and prove upper and lower bounds for
where is the family of axis-parallel
rectangles, halfspaces and disks. Here represents the
smallest real number in such that there exists an
-net of size i with respect to .Comment: 19 pages, 12 figure
Vertex Cover Gets Faster and Harder on Low Degree Graphs
The problem of finding an optimal vertex cover in a graph is a classic
NP-complete problem, and is a special case of the hitting set question. On the
other hand, the hitting set problem, when asked in the context of induced
geometric objects, often turns out to be exactly the vertex cover problem on
restricted classes of graphs. In this work we explore a particular instance of
such a phenomenon. We consider the problem of hitting all axis-parallel slabs
induced by a point set P, and show that it is equivalent to the problem of
finding a vertex cover on a graph whose edge set is the union of two
Hamiltonian Paths. We show the latter problem to be NP-complete, and we also
give an algorithm to find a vertex cover of size at most k, on graphs of
maximum degree four, whose running time is 1.2637^k n^O(1)
Selection Lemmas for various geometric objects
Selection lemmas are classical results in discrete geometry that have been
well studied and have applications in many geometric problems like weak epsilon
nets and slimming Delaunay triangulations. Selection lemma type results
typically show that there exists a point that is contained in many objects that
are induced (spanned) by an underlying point set.
In the first selection lemma, we consider the set of all the objects induced
(spanned) by a point set . This question has been widely explored for
simplices in , with tight bounds in . In our paper,
we prove first selection lemma for other classes of geometric objects. We also
consider the strong variant of this problem where we add the constraint that
the piercing point comes from . We prove an exact result on the strong and
the weak variant of the first selection lemma for axis-parallel rectangles,
special subclasses of axis-parallel rectangles like quadrants and slabs, disks
(for centrally symmetric point sets). We also show non-trivial bounds on the
first selection lemma for axis-parallel boxes and hyperspheres in
.
In the second selection lemma, we consider an arbitrary sized subset of
the set of all objects induced by . We study this problem for axis-parallel
rectangles and show that there exists an point in the plane that is contained
in rectangles. This is an improvement over the previous
bound by Smorodinsky and Sharir when is almost quadratic
Two player game variant of the Erdos-Szekeres problem
The classical Erdos-Szekeres theorem states that a convex -gon exists in
every sufficiently large point set. This problem has been well studied and
finding tight asymptotic bounds is considered a challenging open problem.
Several variants of the Erdos-Szekeres problem have been posed and studied in
the last two decades. The well studied variants include the empty convex
-gon problem, convex -gon with specified number of interior points and
the chromatic variant.
In this paper, we introduce the following two player game variant of the
Erdos-Szekeres problem: Consider a two player game where each player playing in
alternate turns, place points in the plane. The objective of the game is to
avoid the formation of the convex k-gon among the placed points. The game ends
when a convex k-gon is formed and the player who placed the last point loses
the game.
In our paper we show a winning strategy for the player who plays second in
the convex 5-gon game and the empty convex 5-gon game by considering convex
layer configurations at each step. We prove that the game always ends in the
9th step by showing that the game reaches a specific set of configurations
Packing and Covering with Non-Piercing Regions
In this paper, we design the first polynomial time approximation schemes for the Set Cover and Dominating Set problems when the underlying sets are non-piercing regions (which include pseudodisks). We show that the local
search algorithm that yields PTASs when the regions are disks [Aschner/Katz/Morgenstern/Yuditsky, WALCOM 2013; Gibson/Pirwani, 2005; Mustafa/Raman/Ray, 2015] can be extended to work for non-piercing regions. While such an extension is intuitive and natural, attempts to settle this question have failed even for pseudodisks. The techniques used for analysis when the regions are disks rely heavily on the underlying geometry, and do not extend to topologically defined settings such as pseudodisks. In order to prove our results, we introduce novel techniques that we believe will find applications in other problems.
We then consider the Capacitated Region Packing problem. Here, the input consists of a set of points with capacities, and a set of regions. The objective is to pick a maximum cardinality subset of regions so that no point is covered by more regions than its capacity. We show that this problem admits a PTAS when the regions are k-admissible regions (pseudodisks are 2-admissible), and the capacities are bounded. Our result settles a conjecture of Har-Peled (see Conclusion of [Har-Peled, SoCG 2014]) in the affirmative. The conjecture was for a weaker version of the problem, namely when the regions are pseudodisks, the capacities are uniform, and the point set consists of all points in the plane.
Finally, we consider the Capacitated Point Packing problem. In this setting, the regions have capacities, and our
objective is to find a maximum cardinality subset of points such that no region has more points than its capacity. We show that this problem admits a PTAS when the capacity is unity, extending one of the results of Ene et al. [Ene/Har-Peled/Raichel, SoCG 2012]
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