Related papers: Packing, Hitting, and Colouring Squares
The (axis-parallel) stabbing number of a given set of line segments is the maximum number of segments that can be intersected by any one (axis-parallel) line. This paper deals with finding perfect matchings, spanning trees, or…
A covering path for a planar point set is a path drawn in the plane with straight-line edges such that every point lies at a vertex or on an edge of the path. A covering tree is defined analogously. Let $\pi(n)$ be the minimum number such…
We consider the problem of hitting sets online. The hypergraph (i.e., range-space consisting of points and ranges) is known in advance, and the ranges to be stabbed are input one-by-one in an online fashion. The online algorithm must stab…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
Edge-matching problems, also called edge matching puzzles, are abstractions of placement problems with neighborhood conditions. Pieces with colored edges have to be placed on a board such that adjacent edges have the same color. The problem…
A packing $(1^{\ell}, 2^k)$-coloring of a graph $G$ is a partition of $V(G)$ into $\ell$ independent sets and $k$ $2$-packings (whose pairwise vertex distance is at least $3$). The square coloring of planar graphs was first studied by…
In 1960, Asplund and Gr\"unbaum proved that every intersection graph of axis-parallel rectangles in the plane admits an $O(\omega^2)$-coloring, where $\omega$ is the maximum size of a clique. We present the first asymptotic improvement over…
For a family of geometric objects in the plane $\mathcal{F}=\{S_1,\ldots,S_n\}$, define $\chi(\mathcal{F})$ as the least integer $\ell$ such that the elements of $\mathcal{F}$ can be colored with $\ell$ colors, in such a way that any two…
The $k$-center problem is a classical clustering problem in which one is asked to find a partitioning of a point set $P$ into $k$ clusters such that the maximum radius of any cluster is minimized. It is well-studied. But what if we add up…
A matching cut is a matching that is also an edge cut. In the problem Minimum Matching Cut, we ask for a matching cut with the minimum number of edges in the matching. We investigate the differences in complexity between Minimum Matching…
A long-standing conjecture of Zsolt Tuza asserts that the triangle covering number $\tau(G)$ is at most twice the triangle packing number $\nu(G)$, where the triangle packing number $\nu(G)$ is the maximum size of a set of edge-disjoint…
The packing chromatic number $\chi_{\rho}(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the smallest integer $p$ such that vertices of $G$ can be partitioned into disjoint classes $X_{1}, ..., X_{p}$ where vertices in $X_{i}$ have pairwise distance greater than…
Consider a set P of points in the unit square U, one of them being the origin. For each point p in P you may draw a rectangle in U with its lower-left corner in p. What is the maximum area such rectangles can cover without overlapping each…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
Let $a$ be a positive integer, and let $\sigma(a)$ denote the least natural number $s$ such that an integer square lies between $s^2 a$ and $s^2 (a+1)$; let $\tau_s(a)$ denote the number of such integer squares. The function $\sigma(a)$ and…
The hitting set problem asks for a collection of sets over a universe $U$ to find a minimum subset of $U$ that intersects each of the given sets. It is NP-hard and equivalent to the problem set cover. We give a branch-and-bound algorithm to…
The article demonstrates rather general approach to problems of discrete geometry: treat them as global optimization problems to be solved by one of general purpose solver implementing branch-and-bound algorithm (B&B). This approach may be…
Given an integer $d \geq 2$, $s \in (0,1]$, and $t \in [0,2(d-1)]$, suppose a set $X$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$ has the following property: there is a collection of lines of packing dimension $t$ such that every line from the collection intersects…
The geometric hitting set problem is one of the basic geometric combinatorial optimization problems: given a set $P$ of points, and a set $\mathcal{D}$ of geometric objects in the plane, the goal is to compute a small-sized subset of $P$…
Przytycki has shown that the size $\mathcal{N}_{k}(S)$ of a maximal collection of simple closed curves that pairwise intersect at most $k$ times on a topological surface $S$ grows at most as a polynomial in $|\chi(S)|$ of degree…