English

A Locked Orthogonal Tree

Computational Geometry 2008-01-30 v1

Abstract

We give a counterexample to a conjecture of Poon [Poo06] that any orthogonal tree in two dimensions can always be flattened by a continuous motion that preserves edge lengths and avoids self-intersection. We show our example is locked by extending results on strongly locked self-touching linkages due to Connelly, Demaine and Rote [CDR02] to allow zero-length edges as defined in [ADG07], which may be of independent interest. Our results also yield a locked tree with only eleven edges, which is the smallest known example of a locked tree.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0801.4405,
  title  = {A Locked Orthogonal Tree},
  author = {David Charlton and Erik D. Demaine and Martin L. Demaine and Gregory Price and Yaa-Lirng Tu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.4405},
  year   = {2008}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:07:22.238Z