English

The complexity of sharing a pizza

Computational Geometry 2021-09-15 v1

Abstract

Assume you have a 2-dimensional pizza with 2n2n ingredients that you want to share with your friend. For this you are allowed to cut the pizza using several straight cuts, and then give every second piece to your friend. You want to do this fairly, that is, your friend and you should each get exactly half of each ingredient. How many cuts do you need? It was recently shown using topological methods that nn cuts always suffice. In this work, we study the computational complexity of finding such nn cuts. Our main result is that this problem is PPA-complete when the ingredients are represented as point sets. For this, we give a new proof that for point sets nn cuts suffice, which does not use any topological methods. We further prove several hardness results as well as a higher-dimensional variant for the case where the ingredients are well-separated.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.06752,
  title  = {The complexity of sharing a pizza},
  author = {Patrick Schnider},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.06752},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

14 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:57:30.128Z