Related papers: On the hardness of finding normal surfaces

Normal surface theory is a central tool in algorithmic three-dimensional topology, and the enumeration of vertex normal surfaces is the computational bottleneck in many important algorithms. However, it is not well understood how the number…

Computational knot theory and 3-manifold topology have seen significant breakthroughs in recent years, despite the fact that many key algorithms have complexity bounds that are exponential or greater. In this setting, experimentation is…

In three-dimensional computational topology, the theory of normal surfaces is a tool of great theoretical and practical significance. Although this theory typically leads to exponential time algorithms, very little is known about how these…

Normal surface theory, a tool to represent surfaces in a triangulated 3-manifold combinatorially, is ubiquitous in computational 3-manifold theory. In this paper, we investigate a relaxed notion of normal surfaces where we remove the…

It is a major unsolved problem as to whether unknot recognition - that is, testing whether a given closed loop in R^3 can be untangled to form a plain circle - has a polynomial time algorithm. In practice, trivial knots (which can be…

In this paper, we use normal surface theory to study Dehn filling on a knot-manifold. First, it is shown that there is a finite computable set of slopes on the boundary of a knot-manifold that bound normal and almost normal surfaces in a…

We present a practical algorithm to test whether a 3-manifold given by a triangulation or an ideal triangulation contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences. As a testament to…

In this paper we prove that the problem of deciding contractibility of an arbitrary closed curve on the boundary of a 3-manifold is in NP. We emphasize that the manifold and the curve are both inputs to the problem. Moreover, our algorithm…

In general dimension, there is no known total polynomial algorithm for either convex hull or vertex enumeration, i.e. an algorithm whose complexity depends polynomially on the input and output sizes. It is thus important to identify…

Tightness is a generalisation of the notion of convexity: a space is tight if and only if it is "as convex as possible", given its topological constraints. For a simplicial complex, deciding tightness has a straightforward exponential time…

This thesis focuses on two concepts which are widely studied in the field of computational geometry. Namely, visibility and unit disk graphs. In the field of visibility, we have studied the conflict-free chromatic guarding of polygons, for…

Let $\mathcal C$ be a real plane algebraic curve defined by the resultant of two polynomials (resp. by the discriminant of a polynomial). Geometrically such a curve is the projection of the intersection of the surfaces $P(x,y,z)=Q(x,y,z)=0$…

When a group acts on a set, it naturally partitions it into orbits, giving rise to orbit problems. These are natural algorithmic problems, as symmetries are central in numerous questions and structures in physics, mathematics, computer…

There are many fundamental algorithmic problems on triangulated 3-manifolds whose complexities are unknown. Here we study the problem of finding a taut angle structure on a 3-manifold triangulation, whose existence has implications for both…

We propose a hybrid image-space/object-space solution to the classical hidden surface removal problem: Given n disjoint triangles in Real^3 and p sample points (``pixels'') in the xy-plane, determine the first triangle directly behind each…

Tollefson described a variant of normal surface theory for 3-manifolds, called Q-theory, where only the quadrilateral coordinates are used. Suppose $M$ is a triangulated, compact, irreducible, boundary-irreducible 3-manifold. In Q-theory,…

The main purpose of this paper is to study the NP-complete subset-sum problem, not in the usual context of time-complexity-based classification of the algorithms (exponential/polynomial), but through a new kind of algorithmic classification…

We present some algorithms that provide useful topological information about curves in surfaces. One of the main algorithms computes the geometric intersection number of two properly embedded 1-manifolds $C_1$ and $C_2$ in a compact…

We establish the average-case hardness of the algorithmic problem of exact computation of the partition function associated with the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses with Gaussian couplings and random external field. In…

Computing the diameter of the intersection graphs of objects is a basic problem in computational geometry. Previous works showed that the complexity of computing the diameter mainly depends on the object types: for unit disks and squares in…