English

The Painter's Problem: covering a grid with colored connected polygons

Computational Geometry 2017-09-04 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Motivated by a new way of visualizing hypergraphs, we study the following problem. Consider a rectangular grid and a set of colors χ\chi. Each cell ss in the grid is assigned a subset of colors χsχ\chi_s \subseteq \chi and should be partitioned such that for each color cχsc\in \chi_s at least one piece in the cell is identified with cc. Cells assigned the empty color set remain white. We focus on the case where χ={red,blue}\chi = \{\text{red},\text{blue}\}. Is it possible to partition each cell in the grid such that the unions of the resulting red and blue pieces form two connected polygons? We analyze the combinatorial properties and derive a necessary and sufficient condition for such a painting. We show that if a painting exists, there exists a painting with bounded complexity per cell. This painting has at most five colored pieces per cell if the grid contains white cells, and at most two colored pieces per cell if it does not.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.00001,
  title  = {The Painter's Problem: covering a grid with colored connected polygons},
  author = {Arthur van Goethem and Irina Kostitsyna and Marc van Kreveld and Wouter Meulemans and Max Sondag and Jules Wulms},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.00001},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:29:33.893Z