An Upper Bound on the Average Size of Silhouettes

It is a widely observed phenomenon in computer graphics that the size of the silhouette of a polyhedron is much smaller than the size of the whole polyhedron. This paper provides, for the first time, theoretical evidence supporting this for a large class of objects, namely for polyhedra that approximate surfaces in some reasonable way; the surfaces may be non-convex and non-differentiable and they may have boundaries. We prove that such polyhedra have silhouettes of expected size $O(\sqrt{n})$ where the average is taken over all points of view and n is the complexity of the polyhedron

Triangulating the Real Projective Plane

We consider the problem of computing a triangulation of the real projective plane P2, given a finite point set S={p1, p2,..., pn} as input. We prove that a triangulation of P2 always exists if at least six points in S are in general position, i.e., no three of them are collinear. We also design an algorithm for triangulating P2 if this necessary condition holds. As far as we know, this is the first computational result on the real projective plane

Experiments in Model-Checking Optimistic Replication Algorithms

This paper describes a series of model-checking experiments to verify optimistic replication algorithms based on Operational Transformation (OT) approach used for supporting collaborative edition. We formally define, using tool UPPAAL, the behavior and the main consistency requirement (i.e. convergence property) of the collaborative editing systems, as well as the abstract behavior of the environment where these systems are supposed to operate. Due to data replication and the unpredictable nature of user interactions, such systems have infinitely many states. So, we show how to exploit some features of the UPPAAL specification language to attenuate the severe state explosion problem. Two models are proposed. The first one, called concrete model, is very close to the system implementation but runs up against a severe explosion of states. The second model, called symbolic model, aims to overcome the limitation of the concrete model by delaying the effective selection and execution of editing operations until the construction of symbolic execution traces of all sites is completed. Experimental results have shown that the symbolic model allows a significant gain in both space and time. Using the symbolic model, we have been able to show that if the number of sites exceeds 2 then the convergence property is not satisfied for all OT algorithms considered here. A counterexample is provided for every algorithm

Time- and Space-Efficient Evaluation of Some Hypergeometric Constants

The currently best known algorithms for the numerical evaluation of hypergeometric constants such as $\zeta(3)$ to $d$ decimal digits have time complexity $O(M(d) \log^2 d)$ and space complexity of $O(d \log d)$ or $O(d)$. Following work from Cheng, Gergel, Kim and Zima, we present a new algorithm with the same asymptotic complexity, but more efficient in practice. Our implementation of this algorithm improves slightly over existing programs for the computation of $\pi$, and we announce a new record of 2 billion digits for $\zeta(3)$

Interaction Grammars

Interaction Grammar (IG) is a grammatical formalism based on the notion of polarity. Polarities express the resource sensitivity of natural languages by modelling the distinction between saturated and unsaturated syntactic structures. Syntactic composition is represented as a chemical reaction guided by the saturation of polarities. It is expressed in a model-theoretic framework where grammars are constraint systems using the notion of tree description and parsing appears as a process of building tree description models satisfying criteria of saturation and minimality

On the expected size of the 2d visibility complex

We study the expected size of the 2D visibility complex of randomly distributed objects in the plane. We prove that the asymptotic expected number of free bitangents (which correspond to 0-faces of the visibility complex) among unit discs (or polygons of bounded aspect ratio and similar size) is linear and exhibit bounds in terms of the density of the objects. We also make an experimental assessment of the size of the visibility complex for disjoint random unit discs. We provide experimental estimates of the onset of the linear behavior and of the asymptotic slope and y-intercept of the number of free bitangents in terms of the density of discs. Finally, we analyze the quality of our estimates in terms of the density of discs.