In this paper we are proving the following fact. Let P be an arbitrary simple polygon, and let S be an arbitrary set of 15 points inside P. Then there exists a subset T of S that is not "visually discernible", that is, T is not equal to the intersection of S with the visibility region vis(v) of any point v in P. In other words, the VC-dimension d of visibility regions in a simple polygon cannot exceed 14. Since Valtr proved in 1998 that d [6,23] holds, no progress has been made on this bound. By epsilon-net theorems our reduction immediately implies a smaller upper bound to the number of guards needed to cover P.
Without using the @math -net theorem, Kirkpatrick @cite_10 obtained a @math upper bound to the number of boundary guards needed to cover the boundary of @math . This raises the question if the factor @math in the @math bound for @math -nets in other geometric range spaces can be lowered to @math as well, as was shown to be true by @cite_9 for special cases; see also King and Kirkpatrick @cite_1 .
@cite_1 @cite_9 @cite_10
2119142868 1970504456 1513999490 2609098951
We show the existence of @math -nets of size @math for planar point sets and axis-parallel rectangular ranges. The same bound holds for points in the plane and “fat” triangular ranges and for point sets in @math and axis-parallel boxes; these are the first known nontrivial bounds for these range spaces. Our technique also yields improved bounds on the size of @math -nets in the more general context considered by Clarkson and Varadarajan. For example, we show the existence of @math -nets of size @math for the dual range space of “fat” regions and planar point sets (where the regions are the ground objects and the ranges are subsets stabbed by points). Plugging our bounds into the technique of Bronnimann and Goodrich or of Even, Rawitz, and Shahar, we obtain improved approximation factors (computable in expected polynomial time by a randomized algorithm) for the hitting set or the set cover problems associated with the corresponding range spaces. We prove that guarding the vertices of a rectilinear polygon P, whether by guards lying at vertices of P, or by guards lying on the boundary of P, or by guards lying anywhere in P, is NP-hard. For the first two proofs (i.e., vertex guards and boundary guards), we construct a reduction from minimum piercing of 2-intervals. The third proof is somewhat simpler; it is obtained by adapting a known reduction from minimum line cover. We also consider the problem of guarding the vertices of a 1.5D rectilinear terrain. We establish an interesting connection between this problem and the problem of computing a minimum clique cover in chordal graphs. This connection yields a 2-approximation algorithm for the guarding problem. We study Petri nets with Reset arcs (also Transfer and Doubling arcs) in combination with other extensions of the basic Petri net model. While Reachability is undecidable in all these extensions (indeed they are Turing-powerful), we exhibit unexpected frontiers for the decidability of Termination, Coverability, Boundedness and place-Boundedness. In particular, we show counter-intuitive separations between seemingly related problems. Our main theorem is the very surprising fact that boundedness is undecidable for Petri nets with Reset arcs. The full' edge isoperimetric inequality for the discrete cube (due to Harper, Bernstein, Lindsay and Hart) specifies the minimum size of the edge boundary @math of a set @math , as a function of @math . A weaker (but more widely-used) lower bound is @math , where equality holds iff @math is a subcube. In 2011, the first author obtained a sharp stability' version of the latter result, proving that if @math , then there exists a subcube @math such that @math . The weak' version of the edge isoperimetric inequality has the following well-known generalization for the @math -biased' measure @math on the discrete cube: if @math , or if @math and @math is monotone increasing, then @math . In this paper, we prove a sharp stability version of the latter result, which generalizes the aforementioned result of the first author. Namely, we prove that if @math , then there exists a subcube @math such that @math , where @math . This result is a central component in recent work of the authors proving sharp stability versions of a number of Erd o s-Ko-Rado type theorems in extremal combinatorics, including the seminal complete intersection theorem' of Ahlswede and Khachatrian. In addition, we prove a biased-measure analogue of the full' edge isoperimetric inequality, for monotone increasing sets, and we observe that such an analogue does not hold for arbitrary sets, hence answering a question of Kalai. We use this result to give a new proof of the full' edge isoperimetric inequality, one relying on the Kruskal-Katona theorem.