Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1802.06415

Solving Large-Scale Minimum-Weight Triangulation Instances to Provable Optimality

Andreas Haas
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We consider practical methods for the problem of finding a minimum-weight triangulation (MWT) of a planar point set, a classic problem of computational geometry with many applications. While Mulzer and Rote proved in 2006 that computing an MWT is NP-hard, Beirouti and Snoeyink showed in 1998 that computing provably optimal solutions for MWT instances of up to 80,000 uniformly distributed points is possible, making use of clever heuristics that are based on geometric insights. We show that these techniques can be refined and extended to instances of much bigger size and different type, based on an array of modifications and parallelizations in combination with more efficient geometric encodings and data structures. As a result, we are able to solve MWT instances with up to 30,000,000 uniformly distributed points in less than 4 minutes to provable optimality. Moreover, we can compute optimal solutions for a vast array of other benchmark instances that are not uniformly distributed, including normally distributed instances (up to 30,000,000 points), all point sets in the TSPLIB (up to 85,900 points), and VLSI instances with up to 744,710 points. This demonstrates that from a practical point of view, MWT instances can be handled quite well, despite their theoretical difficulty.

Explore related subjects

cs.CG

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Andreas Haas. 2018-02-18. Solving Large-Scale Minimum-Weight Triangulation Instances to Provable Optimality. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06415

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Almost Linear Universal Point Sets for Planar Graphs

A point set is universal for planar graphs on $n$ vertices if every such graph has a straight-line drawing without crossings whose vertices belong to the set. We construct universal point sets of size $n^{1+o(1)}$, improving the previous quadratic upper bound. Our construction uses the reduction of Bannister, Cheng, Devanny, and Eppstein from universal point sets to superpatterns for $213$-avoiding permutations. We represent these permutations by ordered rooted forests and construct a small family of intervals containing every such forest. The result follows from a straightforward bound on the size of the family of intervals. GPT-6 Astra assisted in developing the construction and proof.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2026

Some results on Archdeacon's conjecture for rotation systems

A rotation system on $n$ elements assigns to each element a cyclic order of the other $n-1$ elements. A four-element subset is non-planar if its induced rotation system cannot be realized by a crossing-free drawing of $K_4$. As a combinatorial strengthening of Hill's conjecture on the crossing number of the complete graph, Archdeacon conjectured that every rotation system on $n$ elements has at least $H(n)=\frac{1}{4} \lfloor\frac {n}{2}\rfloor \lfloor\frac{n-1}{2}\rfloor \lfloor\frac{n-2}{2}\rfloor \lfloor\frac{n-3}{2}\rfloor$ non-planar four-element subsets. We computationally verify Archdeacon's conjecture for $n\leq 10$ and show that every extremal rotation system in these orders is realizable by a simple drawing. With computer assistance, we prove that every rotation system on $n$ elements has at least $(8/9 - o(1)) H(n)$ non-planar four-element subsets. We also present a proof by hand for a weaker lower bound of $(2/3-o(1)) H(n)$. Finally, extending recent work of Felsner on antipodal pairs in drawings, we show that Archdeacon's conjecture holds for antipodally shellable rotation systems.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2026

The Hyperbolic Surface Distance, Diameter, and Dirichlet Problems

Despite the prominence of hyperbolic surfaces in mathematics, basic algorithmic questions about them, even computing the distance between two points, have remained open, leaving many features of these surfaces inaccessible. The classical machinery assumes a polyhedral structure absent on a smooth surface. We remove these obstacles. We begin with an efficient $O(g^2)$ algorithm for the distance between two points, where $g$ is the genus of the surface. Building on it, we obtain an $O(g^2 \log g)$ method for answering distance queries from a fixed source and, as a consequence, for recentering a Dirichlet domain around an arbitrary point. This understanding of distances on the surface then lets us approximate the diameter to within any $\eps$ in time $O(g^3 \log g / \eps^2)$. We further show that the diameter, a single real number encoding a great deal about the surface, is exactly computable. Its hyperbolic cosine is an algebraic number over the field encoding the coefficients of the hyperbolic isometries defining the surface.

cs.CG↗