arXiv subjects

Man-Kwun Chiu

Publications and source records attributed to Man-Kwun Chiu.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Drawings of Complete Multipartite Graphs Up to Triangle Flips

For a drawing of a labeled graph, the rotation of a vertex or crossing is the cyclic order of its incident edges, represented by the labels of their other endpoints. The extended rotation system (ERS) of the drawing is the collection of the rotations of all vertices and crossings. A drawing is simple if each pair of edges has at most one common point. Gioan's Theorem states that for any two simple drawings of the complete graph $K_n$ with the same crossing edge pairs, one drawing can be transformed into the other by a sequence of triangle flips (a.k.a. Reidemeister moves of Type 3). This operation refers to the act of moving one edge of a triangular cell formed by three pairwise crossing edges over the opposite crossing of the cell, via a local transformation. We investigate to what extent Gioan-type theorems can be obtained for wider classes of graphs. A necessary (but in general not sufficient) condition for two drawings of a graph to be transformable into each other by a sequence of triangle flips is that they have the same ERS. As our main result, we show that for the large class of complete multipartite graphs, this necessary condition is in fact also sufficient. We present two different proofs of this result, one of which is shorter, while the other one yields a polynomial time algorithm for which the number of needed triangle flips for graphs on $n$ vertices is bounded by $O(n^{16})$. The latter proof uses a Carathéodory-type theorem for simple drawings of complete multipartite graphs, which we believe to be of independent interest. Moreover, we show that our Gioan-type theorem for complete multipartite graphs is essentially tight in the sense that having the same ERS does not remain sufficient when removing or adding very few edges.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2022

Coloring circle arrangements: New $4$-chromatic planar graphs

Felsner, Hurtado, Noy and Streinu (2000) conjectured that arrangement graphs of simple great-circle arrangements have chromatic number at most $3$. Motivated by this conjecture, we study the colorability of arrangement graphs for different classes of arrangements of (pseudo-)circles. In this paper the conjecture is verified for $\triangle$-saturated pseudocircle arrangements, i.e., for arrangements where one color class of the 2-coloring of faces consists of triangles only, as well as for further classes of (pseudo-)circle arrangements. These results are complemented by a construction which maps $\triangle$-saturated arrangements with a pentagonal face to arrangements with 4-chromatic 4-regular arrangement graphs. This "corona" construction has similarities with the crowning construction introduced by Koester (1985). Based on exhaustive experiments with small arrangements we propose three strengthenings of the original conjecture. We also investigate fractional colorings. It is shown that the arrangement graph of every arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ of pairwise intersecting pseudocircles is "close" to being $3$-colorable. More precisely, the fractional chromatic number $χ_f(\mathcal{A})$ of the arrangement graph is bounded from above by $χ_f(\mathcal{A}) \le 3+O(\frac{1}{n})$, where $n$ is the number of pseudocircles of $\mathcal{A}$. Furthermore, we construct an infinite family of $4$-edge-critical $4$-regular planar graphs which are fractionally $3$-colorable. This disproves a conjecture of Gimbel, Kündgen, Li, and Thomassen (2019).

math.CO↗

arXiv2021

Snipperclips: Cutting Tools into Desired Polygons using Themselves

We study Snipperclips, a computer puzzle game whose objective is to create a target shape with two tools. The tools start as constant-complexity shapes, and each tool can snip (i.e., subtract its current shape from) the other tool. We study the computational problem of, given a target shape represented by a polygonal domain of $n$ vertices, is it possible to create it as one of the tools' shape via a sequence of snip operations? If so, how many snip operations are required? We consider several variants of the problem (such as allowing the tools to be disconnected and/or using an undo operation) and bound the number of operations needed for each of the variants.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Recognizing embedded caterpillars with weak unit disk contact representations is NP-hard

Weak unit disk contact graphs are graphs that admit a representation of the nodes as a collection of internally disjoint unit disks whose boundaries touch if there is an edge between the corresponding nodes. We provide a gadget-based reduction to show that recognizing embedded caterpillars that admit a weak unit disk contact representation is NP-hard.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

A Generalization of Self-Improving Algorithms

Ailon et al. [SICOMP'11] proposed self-improving algorithms for sorting and Delaunay triangulation (DT) when the input instances $x_1,\cdots,x_n$ follow some unknown \emph{product distribution}. That is, $x_i$ comes from a fixed unknown distribution $\mathsf{D}_i$, and the $x_i$'s are drawn independently. After spending $O(n^{1+\varepsilon})$ time in a learning phase, the subsequent expected running time is $O((n+ H)/\varepsilon)$, where $H \in \{H_\mathrm{S},H_\mathrm{DT}\}$, and $H_\mathrm{S}$ and $H_\mathrm{DT}$ are the entropies of the distributions of the sorting and DT output, respectively. In this paper, we allow dependence among the $x_i$'s under the \emph{group product distribution}. There is a hidden partition of $[1,n]$ into groups; the $x_i$'s in the $k$-th group are fixed unknown functions of the same hidden variable $u_k$; and the $u_k$'s are drawn from an unknown product distribution. We describe self-improving algorithms for sorting and DT under this model when the functions that map $u_k$ to $x_i$'s are well-behaved. After an $O(\mathrm{poly}(n))$-time training phase, we achieve $O(n + H_\mathrm{S})$ and $O(nα(n) + H_\mathrm{DT})$ expected running times for sorting and DT, respectively, where $α(\cdot)$ is the inverse Ackermann function.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

New Results in Sona Drawing: Hardness and TSP Separation

Given a set of point sites, a sona drawing is a single closed curve, disjoint from the sites and intersecting itself only in simple crossings, so that each bounded region of its complement contains exactly one of the sites. We prove that it is NP-hard to find a minimum-length sona drawing for $n$ given points, and that such a curve can be longer than the TSP tour of the same points by a factor $> 1.5487875$. When restricted to tours that lie on the edges of a square grid, with points in the grid cells, we prove that it is NP-hard even to decide whether such a tour exists. These results answer questions posed at CCCG 2006.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Rectilinear Link Diameter and Radius in a Rectilinear Polygonal Domain

We study the computation of the diameter and radius under the rectilinear link distance within a rectilinear polygonal domain of $n$ vertices and $h$ holes. We introduce a \emph{graph of oriented distances} to encode the distance between pairs of points of the domain. This helps us transform the problem so that we can search through the candidates more efficiently. Our algorithm computes both the diameter and the radius in $\min \{\,O(n^ω), O(n^2 + nh \log h + χ^2)\,\}$ time, where $ω<2.373$ denotes the matrix multiplication exponent and $χ\in Ω(n)\cap O(n^2)$ is the number of edges of the graph of oriented distances. We also provide a faster algorithm for computing the diameter that runs in $O(n^2 \log n)$ time.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Distance bounds for high dimensional consistent digital rays and 2-D partially-consistent digital rays

We consider the problem of digitalizing Euclidean segments. Specifically, we look for a constructive method to connect any two points in $\mathbb{Z}^d$. The construction must be {\em consistent} (that is, satisfy the natural extension of the Euclidean axioms) while resembling them as much as possible. Previous work has shown asymptotically tight results in two dimensions with $Θ(\log N)$ error, where resemblance between segments is measured with the Hausdorff distance, and $N$ is the $L_1$ distance between the two points. This construction was considered tight because of a $Ω(\log N)$ lower bound that applies to any consistent construction in $\mathbb{Z}^2$. In this paper we observe that the lower bound does not directly extend to higher dimensions. We give an alternative argument showing that any consistent construction in $d$ dimensions must have $Ω(\log^{1/(d-1)} N)$ error. We tie the error of a consistent construction in high dimensions to the error of similar {\em weak} constructions in two dimensions (constructions for which some points need not satisfy all the axioms). This not only opens the possibility for having constructions with $o(\log N)$ error in high dimensions, but also opens up an interesting line of research in the tradeoff between the number of axiom violations and the error of the construction. In order to show our lower bound, we also consider a colored variation of the concept of discrepancy of a set of points that we find of independent interest.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Computational Complexity of the $α$-Ham-Sandwich Problem

The classic Ham-Sandwich theorem states that for any $d$ measurable sets in $\mathbb{R}^d$, there is a hyperplane that bisects them simultaneously. An extension by Bárány, Hubard, and Jerónimo [DCG 2008] states that if the sets are convex and \emph{well-separated}, then for any given $α_1, \dots, α_d \in [0, 1]$, there is a unique oriented hyperplane that cuts off a respective fraction $α_1, \dots, α_d$ from each set. Steiger and Zhao [DCG 2010] proved a discrete analogue of this theorem, which we call the \emph{$α$-Ham-Sandwich theorem}. They gave an algorithm to find the hyperplane in time $O(n (\log n)^{d-3})$, where $n$ is the total number of input points. The computational complexity of this search problem in high dimensions is open, quite unlike the complexity of the Ham-Sandwich problem, which is now known to be PPA-complete (Filos-Ratsikas and Goldberg [STOC 2019]). Recently, Fearley, Gordon, Mehta, and Savani [ICALP 2019] introduced a new sub-class of CLS (Continuous Local Search) called \emph{Unique End-of-Potential Line} (UEOPL). This class captures problems in CLS that have unique solutions. We show that for the $α$-Ham-Sandwich theorem, the search problem of finding the dividing hyperplane lies in UEOPL. This gives the first non-trivial containment of the problem in a complexity class and places it in the company of classic search problems such as finding the fixed point of a contraction map, the unique sink orientation problem and the $P$-matrix linear complementarity problem.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

On the Average Complexity of the $k$-Level

Let ${\cal L}$ be an arrangement of $n$ lines in the Euclidean plane. The \emph{$k$-level} of ${\cal L}$ consists of all vertices $v$ of the arrangement which have exactly $k$ lines of ${\cal L}$ passing below $v$. The complexity (the maximum size) of the $k$-level in a line arrangement has been widely studied. In 1998 Dey proved an upper bound of $O(n\cdot (k+1)^{1/3})$. Due to the correspondence between lines in the plane and great-circles on the sphere, the asymptotic bounds carry over to arrangements of great-circles on the sphere, where the $k$-level denotes the vertices at distance at most $k$ to a marked cell, the \emph{south pole}. We prove an upper bound of $O((k+1)^2)$ on the expected complexity of the $k$-level in great-circle arrangements if the south pole is chosen uniformly at random among all cells. We also consider arrangements of great $(d-1)$-spheres on the sphere $\mathbb{S}^d$ which are orthogonal to a set of random points on $\mathbb{S}^d$. In this model, we prove that the expected complexity of the $k$-level is of order $Θ((k+1)^{d-1})$.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2019

Implicit Manifold Reconstruction

Let ${\cal M} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ be a compact, smooth and boundaryless manifold with dimension $m$ and unit reach. We show how to construct a function $φ: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d-m}$ from a uniform $(\varepsilon,κ)$-sample $P$ of $\cal M$ that offers several guarantees. Let $Z_φ$ denote the zero set of $φ$. Let $\widehat{\cal M}$ denote the set of points at distance $\varepsilon$ or less from $\cal M$. There exists $\varepsilon_0 \in (0,1)$ that decreases as $d$ increases such that if $\varepsilon \leq \varepsilon_0$, the following guarantees hold. First, $Z_φ\cap \widehat{\cal M}$ is a faithful approximation of $\cal M$ in the sense that $Z_φ\cap \widehat{\cal M}$ is homeomorphic to $\cal M$, the Hausdorff distance between $Z_φ\cap \widehat{\cal M}$ and $\cal M$ is $O(m^{5/2}\varepsilon^{2})$, and the normal spaces at nearby points in $Z_φ\cap \widehat{\cal M}$ and $\cal M$ make an angle $O(m^2\sqrt{κ\varepsilon})$. Second, $φ$ has local support; in particular, the value of $φ$ at a point is affected only by sample points in $P$ that lie within a distance of $O(m\varepsilon)$. Third, we give a projection operator that only uses sample points in $P$ at distance $O(m\varepsilon)$ from the initial point. The projection operator maps any initial point near $P$ onto $Z_φ\cap \widehat{\cal M}$ in the limit by repeated applications.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2019

The Number of Convex Polyominoes with Given Height and Width

We give a new combinatorial proof for the number of convex polyominoes whose minimum enclosing rectangle has given dimensions. We also count the subclass of these polyominoes that contain the lower left corner of the enclosing rectangle (directed polyominoes). We indicate how to sample random polyominoes in these classes. As a side result, we calculate the first and second moments of the number of common points of two monotone lattice paths between two given points.

math.CO↗

arXiv2019

Routing in Histograms

Let $P$ be an $x$-monotone orthogonal polygon with $n$ vertices. We call $P$ a simple histogram if its upper boundary is a single edge; and a double histogram if it has a horizontal chord from the left boundary to the right boundary. Two points $p$ and $q$ in $P$ are co-visible if and only if the (axis-parallel) rectangle spanned by $p$ and $q$ completely lies in $P$. In the $r$-visibility graph $G(P)$ of $P$, we connect two vertices of $P$ with an edge if and only if they are co-visible. We consider routing with preprocessing in $G(P)$. We may preprocess $P$ to obtain a label and a routing table for each vertex of $P$. Then, we must be able to route a packet between any two vertices $s$ and $t$ of $P$, where each step may use only the label of the target node $t$, the routing table and neighborhood of the current node, and the packet header. We present a routing scheme for double histograms that sends any data packet along a path whose length is at most twice the (unweighted) shortest path distance between the endpoints. In our scheme, the labels, routing tables, and headers need $O(\log n)$ bits. For the case of simple histograms, we obtain a routing scheme with optimal routing paths, $O(\log n)$-bit labels, one-bit routing tables, and no headers.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2019

A note on self-improving sorting with hidden partitions

We study self-improving sorting with hidden partitions. Our result is an optimal algorithm which runs in expected time O(H(π(I)) + n), where I is the given input which contains n elements to be sorted, π(I) is the output which are the ranks of all element in I, and H(π(I)) denotes the entropy of the output.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2018

Routing in Polygonal Domains

We consider the problem of routing a data packet through the visibility graph of a polygonal domain $P$ with $n$ vertices and $h$ holes. We may preprocess $P$ to obtain a label and a routing table for each vertex of $P$. Then, we must be able to route a data packet between any two vertices $p$ and $q$ of $P$, where each step must use only the label of the target node $q$ and the routing table of the current node. For any fixed $\varepsilon > 0$, we present a routing scheme that always achieves a routing path whose length exceeds the shortest path by a factor of at most $1 + \varepsilon$. The labels have $O(\log n)$ bits, and the routing tables are of size $O((\varepsilon^{-1}+h)\log n)$. The preprocessing time is $O(n^2\log n)$. It can be improved to $O(n^2)$ for simple polygons.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2017

Hanabi is NP-hard, Even for Cheaters who Look at Their Cards

In this paper we study a cooperative card game called Hanabi from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. In Hanabi, each card has one among $c$ colors and a number between $1$ and $n$. The aim is to make, for each color, a pile of cards of that color with all increasing numbers from $1$ to $n$. At each time during the game, each player holds $h$ cards in hand. Cards are drawn sequentially from a deck and the players should decide whether to play, discard or store them for future use. One of the features of the game is that the players can see their partners' cards but not their own and information must be shared through hints. We introduce a single-player, perfect-information model and show that the game is intractable even for this simplified version where we forego both the hidden information and the multiplayer aspect of the game, even when the player can only hold two cards in her hand. On the positive side, we show that the decision version of the problem---to decide whether or not numbers from $1$ through $n$ can be played for every color---can be solved in (almost) linear time for some restricted cases.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2016

High Dimensional Consistent Digital Segments

We consider the problem of digitalizing Euclidean line segments from $\mathbb{R}^d$ to $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Christ {\em et al.} (DCG, 2012) showed how to construct a set of {\em consistent digital segment} (CDS) for $d=2$: a collection of segments connecting any two points in $\mathbb{Z}^2$ that satisfies the natural extension of the Euclidean axioms to $\mathbb{Z}^d$. In this paper we study the construction of CDSs in higher dimensions. We show that any total order can be used to create a set of {\em consistent digital rays} CDR in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ (a set of rays emanating from a fixed point $p$ that satisfies the extension of the Euclidean axioms). We fully characterize for which total orders the construction holds and study their Hausdorff distance, which in particular positively answers the question posed by Christ {\em et al.}.

cs.CG↗