Related papers: Packing, Hitting, and Colouring Squares
A set-family ${\cal F}$ is disjointness-compliable if $A' \subseteq A \in {\cal F}$ implies $A' \in {\cal F}$ or $A \setminus A' \in {\cal F}$; if ${\cal F}$ is also symmetric then ${\cal F}$ is proper. A classic result of Goemans and…
We study three covering problems in the plane. Our original motivation for these problems come from trajectory analysis. The first is to decide whether a given set of line segments can be covered by up to four unit-sized, axis-parallel…
For points $p_1,\ldots , p_n$ in the unit square $[0,1]^2$, an \emph{anchored rectangle packing} consists of interior-disjoint axis-aligned empty rectangles $r_1,\ldots , r_n\subseteq [0,1]^2$ such that point $p_i$ is a corner of the…
Given a set of unit-disks in the plane with union area $A$, what fraction of $A$ can be covered by selecting a pairwise disjoint subset of the disks? Rado conjectured 1/4 and proved $1/4.41$. Motivated by the problem of channel-assignment…
Bereg et al. (2012) introduced the Boxes Class Cover problem, which has its roots in classification and clustering applications: Given a set of n points in the plane, each colored red or blue, find the smallest cardinality set of…
Consider a set $P$ of $n$ points on the boundary of an axis-aligned square $Q$. We study the boundary-anchored packing problem on $P$ in which the goal is to find a set of interior-disjoint axis-aligned rectangles in $Q$ such that each…
In the Colored Bin Packing problem a set of items with varying weights and colors must be packed into bins of uniform weight limit such that no two items of the same color may be packed adjacently within a bin. We solve this problem for the…
Given a complete graph with $n$ vertices and non-negative edge weights, where $n$ is divisible by 3, the maximum weight 3-path packing problem is to find a set of $n/3$ vertex-disjoint 3-paths such that the total weight of the 3-paths in…
In a bounded max-coloring of a vertex/edge weighted graph, each color class is of cardinality at most $b$ and of weight equal to the weight of the heaviest vertex/edge in this class. The bounded max-vertex/edge-coloring problems ask for…
We show that deciding whether a given set of circles can be packed into a rectangle, an equilateral triangle, or a unit square are NP-hard problems, settling the complexity of these natural packing problems. On the positive side, we show…
An old conjecture of Zs. Tuza says that for any graph $G$, the ratio of the minimum size, $\tau_3(G)$, of a set of edges meeting all triangles to the maximum size, $\nu_3(G)$, of an edge-disjoint triangle packing is at most 2. Here,…
Tusn\'ady's problem asks to bound the discrepancy of points and axis-parallel boxes in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Algorithmic bounds on Tusn\'ady's problem use a canonical decomposition of Matou\v{s}ek for the system of points and axis-parallel boxes,…
In the Minimum Bisection problem, input is a graph $G$ and the goal is to partition the vertex set into two parts $A$ and $B$, such that $||A|-|B|| \le 1$ and the number $k$ of edges between $A$ and $B$ is minimized. This problem can be…
The main goal of this paper is to address the following problem: given a positive integer $n$, find the largest value $S(n)$ such that a square of edge length $S(n)$ in the Euclidean plane can be covered by $n$ unit squares. We investigate…
A necklace can be considered as a cyclic list of $n$ red and $n$ blue beads in an arbitrary order, and the goal is to fold it into two and find a large cross-free matching of pairs of beads of different colors. We give a counterexample for…
In this paper we will examine unions of oriented and non-oriented unit squares in same plane and measure the ratio of perimeter to area of these unions. In 1998, T. Keleti published the conjecture that this ratio never exceeds 4. We outline…
The well-known problem stated by A. Meir and L. Moser consists in tiling the unit square with rectangles (details), whose side lengths equal $1/n\times 1/(n+1)$, where indices~$n$ range from 1 to infinity. Recently, Terence Tao has proved…
A linear system is a pair $(P,\mathcal{L})$ where $\mathcal{L}$ is a family of subsets on a ground finite set $P$, such that $|l\cap l^\prime|\leq 1$, for every $l,l^\prime \in \mathcal{L}$. The elements of $P$ and $\mathcal{L}$ are called…
Given a graph, the general problem to cover the maximum number of vertices by a collection of vertex-disjoint long paths seemingly escapes from the literature. A path containing at least $k$ vertices is considered long. When $k \le 3$, the…
This paper considers pairs of optimization problems that are defined from a single input and for which it is desired to find a good approximation to either one of the problems. In many instances, it is possible to efficiently find an…