Computing farthest neighbors on a convex polytope

Any set of n points in convex position in the plane induces at most 2n congruent copies of a fixed isosceles triangle. Furthermore, at most 2n–4 congruent isosceles right triangles can be induced by a set of n points in convex position, and in strictly convex position at most n congruent isosceles right triangles can be induced.

We consider preprocessing a set S of n points in the plane that are in convex position into a data structure supporting queries of the following form: given a point q and a directed line l in the plane, report the point of S that is farthest from (or, alternatively, nearest to) the point q subject to being to the left of line l. We present two data structures for this problem. The first data structure uses O(n1+e) space and preprocessing time, and answers queries in O(21/e log n) time. The second data structure uses O(n log3n) space and polynomial preprocessing time, and answers queries in O(log n) time. These are the first solutions to the problem with O(log n) query time and o(n2) space. In the process of developing the second data structure, we develop a new representation of nearest-point and farthest-point Voronoi diagrams of points in convex position. This representation supports insertion of new points in counterclockwise order using only O(log n) amortized pointer changes, subject to supporting O(log n)-time point-location queries, even though every such update may make Θ(n) combinatorial changes to the Voronoi diagram. This data structure is the first demonstration that deterministically and incrementally constructed Voronoi diagrams can be maintained in o(n) pointer changes per operation while keeping O(log n)-time point-location queries.

Extremal problems on triangle areas in two and three dimensions

In this paper we give a lower bound for the Erd\H os–Szekeres number in higher dimensions. Namely, in two different ways we construct, for every $n>d\ge 2$, a configuration of $n$ points in general position in $\R^d$ containing at most $c_d(\log n)^{d-1}$ points in convex position. (Points in $\R^d$ are in convex position if none of them lies in the convex hull of the others.)

On the stretch factor of Delaunay triangulations of points in convex position

We study the following family of problems: Given a set of $n$ points in convex position, what is the maximum number triangles one can create having these points as vertices while avoiding certain sets of forbidden configurations. As forbidden configurations we consider all 8 ways in which a pair of triangles in such a point set can interact. This leads to 256 extremal Turán-type questions. We give nearly tight (within a $\log n$ factor) bounds for 248 of these questions and show that the remaining 8 questions are all asymptotically equivalent to Stein's longstanding tripod packing problem.

Long alternating paths in bicolored point sets

Given n red and n blue points in convex position in the plane, we show that there exists a noncrossing alternating path of length \(n+c\sqrt{n\over \log n}\). We disprove a conjecture of Erdős by constructing an example without any such path of length greater than \({4\over 3}n+c'\sqrt{n}\).KeywordsPlanar GraphOuter SegmentHamiltonian CycleAlternate PathBlue PointThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

We study several problems concerning convex polygons whose vertices lie in a Cartesian product of two sets of n real numbers (for short, grid). First, we prove that every such grid contains a convex polygon with Omega(log n) vertices and that this bound is tight up to a constant factor. We generalize this result to d dimensions (for a fixed d in N), and obtain a tight lower bound of Omega(log^{d-1}n) for the maximum number of points in convex position in a d-dimensional grid. Second, we present polynomial-time algorithms for computing the longest convex polygonal chain in a grid that contains no two points with the same x- or y-coordinate. We show that the maximum size of such a convex polygon can be efficiently approximated up to a factor of 2. Finally, we present exponential bounds on the maximum number of convex polygons in these grids, and for some restricted variants. These bounds are tight up to polynomial factors.

Lower bounds on the maximum number of non-crossing acyclic graphs

This paper starts the investigation of a constrained version of the point-set embed-dability problem. Let G = (V,E) be a planar graph with n vertices, G′ = (V′,E′) a subgraph of G, and S a set of n distinct points in the plane. We study the problem of computing a point-set embedding of G on S subject to the constraint that G′ is drawn with straight-line edges. Different drawing algorithms are presented that guarantee small curve complexity of the resulting drawing, i.e. a small number of bends per edge. It is proved that: • If G′ is an outerplanar graph and S is any set of points in convex position, a point-set embedding of G on S can be computed such that the edges of E\E′ have at most 4 bends each. • If S is any set of points in general position and G′ is a face of G or if it is a simple path, the curve complexity of the edges of E\E′ is at most 8. • If S is in general position and G′ is a set of k disjoint paths, the curve complexity of the edges of E \ E′ is O(2k).

We investigate the $$L_1$$ geodesic farthest neighbors in a simple polygon P, and address several fundamental problems related to farthest neighbors. Given a subset $$S \subseteq P$$ , an $$L_1$$ geodesic farthest neighbor of $$p \in P$$ from S is one that maximizes the length of $$L_1$$ shortest path from p in P. Our list of problems include: computing the diameter, radius, center, farthest-neighbor Voronoi diagram, and two-center of S under the $$L_1$$ geodesic distance. We show that all these problems can be solved in linear or near-linear time based on our new observations on farthest neighbors and extreme points. Among them, the key observation shows that there are at most four extreme points of any compact subset $$S \subseteq P$$ with respect to the $$L_1$$ geodesic distance after removing redundancy.

The farthest line-segment Voronoi diagram shows properties surprisingly different from the farthest point Voronoi diagram: Voronoi regions may be disconnected and they are not characterized by convex-hull properties. In this paper we introduce the farthest line-segment hull and its Gaussian map, a closed polygonal curve that characterizes the regions of the farthest line-segment Voronoi diagram similarly to the way an ordinary convex hull characterizes the regions of the farthest-point Voronoi diagram. We also derive tighter bounds on the (linear) size of the farthest line-segment Voronoi diagram. With the purpose of unifying construction algorithms for farthest-point and farthest line-segment Voronoi diagrams, we adapt standard techniques for the construction of a convex hull to compute the farthest line-segment hull in O(n logn) or output-sensitive O(n logh) time, where n is the number of segments and h is the size of the hull (number of Voronoi faces). As a result, the farthest line-segment Voronoi diagram can be constructed in output sensitive O(n logh) time.

Consider a set $S$ of points in the plane in convex position, where each point has an integer label from $\{0,1,\ldots,n-1\}$. This naturally induces a labeling of the edges: each edge $(i,j)$ is assigned label $i+j$, modulo $n$. We propose the algorithms for finding large non―crossing $\textit{harmonic}$ matchings or paths, i. e. the matchings or paths in which no two edges have the same label. When the point labels are chosen uniformly at random, and independently of each other, our matching algorithm with high probability (w.h.p.) delivers a nearly―perfect matching, a matching of size $n/2 - O(n^{1/3}\ln n)$.

On the maximum area pentagon in a planar point set