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Prosenjit Bose

Publications and source records attributed to Prosenjit Bose.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

Revisiting the Problem of Searching on a Line

We revisit the problem of searching for a target at an unknown location on a line when given upper and lower bounds on the distance D that separates the initial position of the searcher from the target. Prior to this work, only asymptotic bounds were known for the optimal competitive ratio achievable by any search strategy in the worst case. We present the first tight bounds on the exact optimal competitive ratio achievable, parameterized in terms of the given bounds on D, along with an optimal search strategy that achieves this competitive ratio. We prove that this optimal strategy is unique. We characterize the conditions under which an optimal strategy can be computed exactly and, when it cannot, we explain how numerical methods can be used efficiently. In addition, we answer several related open questions, including the maximal reach problem, and we discuss how to generalize these results to m rays, for any m >= 2.

cs.DS↗

A History of Flips in Combinatorial Triangulations

Given two combinatorial triangulations, how many edge flips are necessary and sufficient to convert one into the other? This question has occupied researchers for over 75 years. We provide a comprehensive survey, including full proofs, of the various attempts to answer it.

cs.CG↗

Robust Geometric Spanners

Highly connected and yet sparse graphs (such as expanders or graphs of high treewidth) are fundamental, widely applicable and extensively studied combinatorial objects. We initiate the study of such highly connected graphs that are, in addition, geometric spanners. We define a property of spanners called robustness. Informally, when one removes a few vertices from a robust spanner, this harms only a small number of other vertices. We show that robust spanners must have a superlinear number of edges, even in one dimension. On the positive side, we give constructions, for any dimension, of robust spanners with a near-linear number of edges.

cs.CG↗

Minimum-Area Enclosing Triangle with a Fixed Angle

Given a set S of n points in the plane and a fixed angle 0 < omega < pi, we show how to find in O(n log n) time all triangles of minimum area with one angle omega that enclose S. We prove that in general, the solution cannot be written without cubic roots. We also prove an Omega(n log n) lower bound for this problem in the algebraic computation tree model. If the input is a convex n-gon, our algorithm takes Theta(n) time.

cs.CG↗

The Power and Limitations of Static Binary Search Trees with Lazy Finger

A static binary search tree where every search starts from where the previous one ends (lazy finger) is considered. Such a search method is more powerful than that of the classic optimal static trees, where every search starts from the root (root finger), and less powerful than when rotations are allowed---where finding the best rotation based tree is the topic of the dynamic optimality conjecture of Sleator and Tarjan. The runtime of the classic root-finger tree can be expressed in terms of the entropy of the distribution of the searches, but we show that this is not the case for the optimal lazy finger tree. A non-entropy based asymptotically-tight expression for the runtime of the optimal lazy finger trees is derived, and a dynamic programming-based method is presented to compute the optimal tree.

cs.DS↗

Network Farthest-Point Diagrams

Consider the continuum of points along the edges of a network, i.e., an undirected graph with positive edge weights. We measure distance between these points in terms of the shortest path distance along the network, known as the network distance. Within this metric space, we study farthest points. We introduce network farthest-point diagrams, which capture how the farthest points---and the distance to them---change as we traverse the network. We preprocess a network G such that, when given a query point q on G, we can quickly determine the farthest point(s) from q in G as well as the farthest distance from q in G. Furthermore, we introduce a data structure supporting queries for the parts of the network that are farther away from q than some threshold R > 0, where R is part of the query. We also introduce the minimum eccentricity feed-link problem defined as follows. Given a network G with geometric edge weights and a point p that is not on G, connect p to a point q on G with a straight line segment pq, called a feed-link, such that the largest network distance from p to any point in the resulting network is minimized. We solve the minimum eccentricity feed-link problem using eccentricity diagrams. In addition, we provide a data structure for the query version, where the network G is fixed and a query consists of the point p.

cs.CG↗

On the stretch factor of the Theta-4 graph

In this paper we show that the θ-graph with 4 cones has constant stretch factor, i.e., there is a path between any pair of vertices in this graph whose length is at most a constant times the Euclidean distance between that pair of vertices. This is the last θ-graph for which it was not known whether its stretch factor was bounded.

cs.CG↗

Making triangulations 4-connected using flips

We show that any combinatorial triangulation on n vertices can be transformed into a 4-connected one using at most floor((3n - 9)/5) edge flips. We also give an example of an infinite family of triangulations that requires this many flips to be made 4-connected, showing that our bound is tight. In addition, for n >= 19, we improve the upper bound on the number of flips required to transform any 4-connected triangulation into the canonical triangulation (the triangulation with two dominant vertices), matching the known lower bound of 2n - 15. Our results imply a new upper bound on the diameter of the flip graph of 5.2n - 33.6, improving on the previous best known bound of 6n - 30.

cs.CG↗

Visibility-Monotonic Polygon Deflation

A deflated polygon is a polygon with no visibility crossings. We answer a question posed by Devadoss et al. (2012) by presenting a polygon that cannot be deformed via continuous visibility-decreasing motion into a deflated polygon. We show that the least n for which there exists such an n-gon is seven. In order to demonstrate non-deflatability, we use a new combinatorial structure for polygons, the directed dual, which encodes the visibility properties of deflated polygons. We also show that any two deflated polygons with the same directed dual can be deformed, one into the other, through a visibility-preserving deformation.

cs.CG↗

Coloring and Guarding Arrangements

Given an arrangement of lines in the plane, what is the minimum number $c$ of colors required to color the lines so that no cell of the arrangement is monochromatic? In this paper we give bounds on the number c both for the above question, as well as some of its variations. We redefine these problems as geometric hypergraph coloring problems. If we define $\Hlinecell$ as the hypergraph where vertices are lines and edges represent cells of the arrangement, the answer to the above question is equal to the chromatic number of this hypergraph. We prove that this chromatic number is between $Ω(\log n / \log\log n)$. and $O(\sqrt{n})$. Similarly, we give bounds on the minimum size of a subset $S$ of the intersections of the lines in $\mathcal{A}$ such that every cell is bounded by at least one of the vertices in $S$. This may be seen as a problem on guarding cells with vertices when the lines act as obstacles. The problem can also be defined as the minimum vertex cover problem in the hypergraph $\Hvertexcell$, the vertices of which are the line intersections, and the hyperedges are vertices of a cell. Analogously, we consider the problem of touching the lines with a minimum subset of the cells of the arrangement, which we identify as the minimum vertex cover problem in the $\Hcellzone$ hypergraph.

cs.CG↗

De-amortizing Binary Search Trees

We present a general method for de-amortizing essentially any Binary Search Tree (BST) algorithm. In particular, by transforming Splay Trees, our method produces a BST that has the same asymptotic cost as Splay Trees on any access sequence while performing each search in O(log n) worst case time. By transforming Multi-Splay Trees, we obtain a BST that is O(log log n) competitive, satisfies the scanning theorem, the static optimality theorem, the static finger theorem, the working set theorem, and performs each search in O(log n) worst case time. Moreover, we prove that if there is a dynamically optimal BST algorithm, then there is a dynamically optimal BST algorithm that answers every search in O(log n) worst case time.

cs.DS↗

Automatically Creating Design Models from 3D Anthropometry Data

When designing a product that needs to fit the human shape, designers often use a small set of 3D models, called design models, either in physical or digital form, as representative shapes to cover the shape variabilities of the population for which the products are designed. Until recently, the process of creating these models has been an art involving manual interaction and empirical guesswork. The availability of the 3D anthropometric databases provides an opportunity to create design models optimally. In this paper, we propose a novel way to use 3D anthropometric databases to generate design models that represent a given population for design applications such as the sizing of garments and gear. We generate the representative shapes by solving a covering problem in a parameter space. Well-known techniques in computational geometry are used to solve this problem. We demonstrate the method using examples in designing glasses and helmets.

cs.CG↗

Improved Methods For Generating Quasi-Gray Codes

Consider a sequence of bit strings of length d, such that each string differs from the next in a constant number of bits. We call this sequence a quasi-Gray code. We examine the problem of efficiently generating such codes, by considering the number of bits read and written at each generating step, the average number of bits read while generating the entire code, and the number of strings generated in the code. Our results give a trade-off between these constraints, and present algorithms that do less work on average than previous results, and that increase the number of bit strings generated.

cs.DM↗

Should Static Search Trees Ever Be Unbalanced?

In this paper we study the question of whether or not a static search tree should ever be unbalanced. We present several methods to restructure an unbalanced k-ary search tree $T$ into a new tree $R$ that preserves many of the properties of $T$ while having a height of $\log_k n +1$ which is one unit off of the optimal height. More specifically, we show that it is possible to ensure that the depth of the elements in $R$ is no more than their depth in $T$ plus at most $\log_k \log_k n +2$. At the same time it is possible to guarantee that the average access time $P(R)$ in tree $R$ is no more than the average access time $P(T)$ in tree $T$ plus $O(\log_k P(T))$. This suggests that for most applications, a balanced tree is always a better option than an unbalanced one since the balanced tree has similar average access time and much better worst case access time.

cs.DS↗

The dilation of the Delaunay triangulation is greater than π/2

Consider the Delaunay triangulation T of a set P of points in the plane as a Euclidean graph, in which the weight of every edge is its length. It has long been conjectured that the dilation in T of any pair p, p \in P, which is the ratio of the length of the shortest path from p to p' in T over the Euclidean distance ||pp'||, can be at most π/2 \approx 1.5708. In this paper, we show how to construct point sets in convex position with dilation > 1.5810 and in general position with dilation > 1.5846. Furthermore, we show that a sufficiently large set of points drawn independently from any distribution will in the limit approach the worst-case dilation for that distribution.

cs.CG↗

Odds-On Trees

Let R^d -> A be a query problem over R^d for which there exists a data structure S that can compute P(q) in O(log n) time for any query point q in R^d. Let D be a probability measure over R^d representing a distribution of queries. We describe a data structure called the odds-on tree, of size O(n^ε) that can be used as a filter that quickly computes P(q) for some query values q in R^d and relies on S for the remaining queries. With an odds-on tree, the expected query time for a point drawn according to D is O(H*+1), where H* is a lower-bound on the expected cost of any linear decision tree that solves P. Odds-on trees have a number of applications, including distribution-sensitive data structures for point location in 2-d, point-in-polytope testing in d dimensions, ray shooting in simple polygons, ray shooting in polytopes, nearest-neighbour queries in R^d, point-location in arrangements of hyperplanes in R^d, and many other geometric searching problems that can be solved in the linear-decision tree model. A standard lifting technique extends these results to algebraic decision trees of constant degree. A slightly different version of odds-on trees yields similar results for orthogonal searching problems that can be solved in the comparison tree model.

cs.CG↗

Pi/2-Angle Yao Graphs are Spanners

We show that the Yao graph Y4 in the L2 metric is a spanner with stretch factor 8(29+23sqrt(2)). Enroute to this, we also show that the Yao graph Y4 in the Linf metric is a planar spanner with stretch factor 8.

cs.CG↗