We investigate what computational tasks can be performed on a point set in
ℜd, if we are only given black-box access to it via nearest-neighbor
search. This is a reasonable assumption if the underlying point set is either
provided implicitly, or it is stored in a data structure that can answer such
queries. In particular, we show the following: (A) One can compute an
approximate bi-criteria k-center clustering of the point set, and more
generally compute a greedy permutation of the point set. (B) One can decide if
a query point is (approximately) inside the convex-hull of the point set.
We also investigate the problem of clustering the given point set, such that
meaningful proximity queries can be carried out on the centers of the clusters,
instead of the whole point set