Fast fencing

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

We consider very natural “fence enclosure” problems studied by Capoyleas, Rote, and Woeginger and Arkin, Khuller, and Mitchell in the early 90s. Given a set S of n points in the plane, we aim at finding a set of closed curves such that (1) each point is enclosed by a curve and (2) the total length of the curves is minimized. We consider two main variants. In the first variant, we pay a unit cost per curve in addition to the total length of the curves. An equivalent formulation of this version is that we have to enclose n unit disks, paying only the total length of the enclosing curves. In the other variant, we are allowed to use at most k closed curves and pay no cost per curve. For the variant with at most k closed curves, we present an algorithm that is polynomial in both n and k. For the variant with unit cost per curve, or unit disks, we present a near-linear time algorithm. Capoyleas, Rote, and Woeginger solved the problem with at most k curves in nO(k) time. Arkin, Khuller, and Mitchell used this to solve the unit cost per curve version in exponential time. At the time, they conjectured that the problem with k curves is NP-hard for general k. Our polynomial time algorithm refutes this unless P equals NP.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSTOC 2018 - Proceedings of the 50th Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication date2018
Pages564-573
ISBN (Electronic)9781450355599
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Event50th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2018 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: 25 Jun 201829 Jun 2018

Conference

Conference50th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2018
LandUnited States
ByLos Angeles
Periode25/06/201829/06/2018
SponsorACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT)

    Research areas

  • Geometric clustering, Minimum perimeter sum

ID: 203772009