English

A Purely Geometric Variant of the Gale-Berlekamp Switching Game

Computational Geometry 2025-08-19 v4 Combinatorics

Abstract

We introduce the following variant of the Gale-Berlekamp switching game. Let PP be a set of n noncollinear points in the plane, each of them having weight +1+1 or 1-1. At each step, we pick a line \ell passing through at least two points of PP, and switch the sign of every point pPp \in P\cap\ell. The objective is to maximize the total weight of the elements of PP. We show that one can always achieve that this quantity is at least no(n)n - o(n), as nn\rightarrow\infty, and at least n/3n/3, for every nn. Moreover, these can be attained by a polynomial time algorithm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.16305,
  title  = {A Purely Geometric Variant of the Gale-Berlekamp Switching Game},
  author = {Adrian Dumitrescu and Jeck Lim and János Pach and Ji Zeng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.16305},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

11 pages, 3 figures