Simple Wriggling is Hard unless You Are a Fat Hippo
Computational Geometry
2015-05-19 v1
Abstract
We prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether two points in a polygonal domain with holes can be connected by a wire. This implies that finding any approximation to the shortest path for a long snake amidst polygonal obstacles is NP-hard. On the positive side, we show that snake's problem is "length-tractable": if the snake is "fat", i.e., its length/width ratio is small, the shortest path can be computed in polynomial time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1005.5413,
title = {Simple Wriggling is Hard unless You Are a Fat Hippo},
author = {Irina Kostitsyna and Valentin Polishchuk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.5413},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
A shorter version is to be presented at FUN 2010