I hope it is the right place to ask this. I wasn't sure if it belongs to Stack Overflow or Computer Science.Eventually this seemed more suitable.  Anyway, some background first:A closed curve, is a curve with no endpoints and which completely encloses an area.A simple curve, is a curve that does not cross itself.  Example:  Now, given n ordered (x,y) coordinates that represents mouse movement, it is easy to determine if they form a closed curve (given an upper bound on the allowed distance between two points, of-course), but is there an algorithm that will determine whether or not the coordinates form a simple curve? I tried to look online for an answer, but couldn't find relevant solutions.
How to determine if set of ordered coordinates form a simple curve?
algorithms;geometry
You could argue that a curve is simple if there are no two line segments between points such that the lines intersect, meaning you could check if a curve is simple by verifying the absence of this condition.The algorithm would look something like:for each p1, p2 in pointlist  for each p3, p4 in pointlist     if line_segment(p1, p2) intersects line_segment(p3, p4)        return falsereturn true   Note that p2 would be the successive point after p1 and similarly, p4 would be the successive point after p3.  In order to avoid redundancy, points p3 and p4 could start after points p1 and p2.  This should be easily done in O(n^2) time.  Be careful in your check for intersection since at least once the lines will be the same (no dividing by zero).If you have many such points, you could skip every other point and this algorithm will run 4 times faster at the small risk that a truly intersecting line may not be detected should the curve approach a tangent.