Given two triangulations of a convex polygon, computing the minimum number of flips required to transform one to the other is a long-standing open problem. It is not known whether the problem is in P or NP-complete. We prove that two natural generalizations of the problem are NP-complete, namely computing the minimum number of flips between two triangulations of (1) a polygon with holes; (2) a set of points in the plane.
For both triangulations of point sets and simple polygons, it is known that determining the flip distance between two triangulations is an NP-hard problem. To gain more insight into flips of triangulations and to characterize "where edges go" when flipping from one triangulation to another, flips in edge-labeled triangulations have lately attracted considerable interest. In a recent breakthrough, Lubiw, Masárová, and Wagner (in Proc. 33rd Symp. of Computational Geometry, 2017) prove the so-called "Orbit Conjecture" for edge-labeled triangulations and ask for the complexity of the flip distance…
Let T be a triangulation of a simple polygon. A flip in T is the operation of removing one diagonal of T and adding a different one such that the resulting graph is again a triangulation. The flip distance between two triangulations is the smallest number of flips required to transform one triangulation into the other. For the special case of convex polygons, the problem of determining the shortest flip distance between two triangulations is equivalent to determining the rotation distance between two binary trees, a central problem which is still open after over 25 years of intensive study. We…
The flip graph for a set $P$ of points in the plane has a vertex for every triangulation of $P$, and an edge when two triangulations differ by one flip that replaces one triangulation edge by another. The flip graph is known to have some connectivity properties: (1) the flip graph is connected; (2) connectivity still holds when restricted to triangulations containing some constrained edges between the points; (3) for $P$ in general position of size $n$, the flip graph is $\lceil \frac{n}{2} -2 \rceil$-connected, a recent result of Wagner and Welzl (SODA 2020). We introduce the study of connect…
Given two combinatorial triangulations, how many edge flips are necessary and sufficient to convert one into the other? This question has occupied researchers for over 75 years. We provide a comprehensive survey, including full proofs, of the various attempts to answer it.
We show that every triangulation (maximal planar graph) on $n\ge 6$ vertices can be flipped into a Hamiltonian triangulation using a sequence of less than $n/2$ combinatorial edge flips. The previously best upper bound uses $4$-connectivity as a means to establish Hamiltonicity. But in general about $3n/5$ flips are necessary to reach a $4$-connected triangulation. Our result improves the upper bound on the diameter of the flip graph of combinatorial triangulations on $n$ vertices from $5.2n-33.6$ to $5n-23$. We also show that for every triangulation on $n$ vertices there is a simultaneous fli…
We show that any combinatorial triangulation on n vertices can be transformed into a 4-connected one using at most floor((3n - 9)/5) edge flips. We also give an example of an infinite family of triangulations that requires this many flips to be made 4-connected, showing that our bound is tight. In addition, for n >= 19, we improve the upper bound on the number of flips required to transform any 4-connected triangulation into the canonical triangulation (the triangulation with two dominant vertices), matching the known lower bound of 2n - 15. Our results imply a new upper bound on the diameter …
We show that $O(n^2)$ exchanging flips suffice to transform any edge-labelled pointed pseudo-triangulation into any other with the same set of labels. By using insertion, deletion and exchanging flips, we can transform any edge-labelled pseudo-triangulation into any other with $O(n \log c + h \log h)$ flips, where $c$ is the number of convex layers and $h$ is the number of points on the convex hull.
In this work we consider triangulations of point sets in the Euclidean plane, i.e., maximal straight-line crossing-free graphs on a finite set of points. Given a triangulation of a point set, an edge flip is the operation of removing one edge and adding another one, such that the resulting graph is again a triangulation. Flips are a major way of locally transforming triangular meshes. We show that, given a point set $S$ in the Euclidean plane and two triangulations $T_1$ and $T_2$ of $S$, it is an APX-hard problem to minimize the number of edge flips to transform $T_1$ to $T_2$.
Flips in triangulations have received a lot of attention over the past decades. However, the problem of tracking where particular edges go during the flipping process has not been addressed. We examine this question by attaching unique labels to the triangulation edges. We introduce the concept of the orbit of an edge $e$, which is the set of all edges reachable from $e$ via flips. We establish the first upper and lower bounds on the diameter of the flip graph in this setting. Specifically, we prove tight $Θ(n \log n)$ bounds for edge-labelled triangulations of $n$-vertex convex polygons and c…
The development of laser scanning techniques has popularized the representation of 3D shapes by triangular meshes with a large number of vertices. Compression techniques dedicated to such meshes have emerged, which exploit the idea that the connectivity of a dense mesh does not deviate much from the connectivity that can be constructed automatically from the vertex positions (while possibly being guided by additional codes). The edge flip is one of the tools that can encode the differences between two meshes, and it is important to control the length of a sequence of flips that transform one t…
We consider geometric triangulations of surfaces, i.e., triangulations whose edges can be realized by disjoint locally geodesic segments. We prove that the flip graph of geometric triangulations with fixed vertices of a flat torus or a closed hyperbolic surface is connected. We give upper bounds on the number of edge flips that are necessary to transform any geometric triangulation on such a surface into a Delaunay triangulation.
Simultaneous diagonal flips in plane triangulations are investigated. It is proved that every $n$-vertex triangulation with at least six vertices has a simultaneous flip into a 4-connected triangulation, and that it can be computed in O(n) time. It follows that every triangulation has a simultaneous flip into a Hamiltonian triangulation. This result is used to prove that for any two $n$-vertex triangulations, there exists a sequence of $O(\log n)$ simultaneous flips to transform one into the other. The total number of edges flipped in this sequence is O(n). The maximum size of a simultaneous f…
Delaunay flip is an elegant, simple tool to convert a triangulation of a point set to its Delaunay triangulation. The technique has been researched extensively for full dimensional triangulations of point sets. However, an important case of triangulations which are not full dimensional is surface triangulations in three dimensions. In this paper we address the question of converting a surface triangulation to a subcomplex of the Delaunay triangulation with edge flips. We show that the surface triangulations which closely approximate a smooth surface with uniform density can be transformed to a…
Given a finite point set P in general position in the plane, a full triangulation is a maximal straight-line embedded plane graph on P. A partial triangulation is a full triangulation of some subset P' of P containing all extreme points in P. A bistellar flip on a partial triangulation flips an edge (an edge flip), removes a non-extreme point of degree 3, or adds a point in P \ P' as vertex of degree 3. The bistellar flip graph has all partial triangulations as vertices, and a pair of partial triangulations is adjacent if they can be obtained from one another by a bistellar flip. The edge flip…
Given a triangulation of a point set in the plane, a \emph{flip} deletes an edge $e$ whose removal leaves a convex quadrilateral, and replaces $e$ by the opposite diagonal of the quadrilateral. It is well known that any triangulation of a point set can be reconfigured to any other triangulation by some sequence of flips. We explore this question in the setting where each edge of a triangulation has a label, and a flip transfers the label of the removed edge to the new edge. It is not true that every labelled triangulation of a point set can be reconfigured to every other labelled triangulation…
The flip graph of triangulations has as vertices all triangulations of a convex $n$-gon, and an edge between any two triangulations that differ in exactly one edge. An $r$-rainbow cycle in this graph is a cycle in which every inner edge of the triangulation appears exactly $r$ times. This notion of a rainbow cycle extends in a natural way to other flip graphs. In this paper we investigate the existence of $r$-rainbow cycles for three different flip graphs on classes of geometric objects: the aforementioned flip graph of triangulations of a convex $n$-gon, the flip graph of plane trees on an ar…
In this thesis, we study two different graph problems. The first problem revolves around geometric spanners. Here, we have a set of points in the plane and we want to connect them with straight line segments, such that there is a path between each pair of points that does not make a large detour. If we achieve this, the resulting graph is called a spanner. We focus our attention on $Θ$-graphs, which are constructed by connecting each point with its nearest neighbour in a fixed number of cones. Although this construction is very straight-forward, it has proven challenging to fully determine the…
In this paper we consider the flip operation for combinatorial pointed pseudo-triangulations where faces have size 3 or 4, so-called combinatorial 4-PPTs. We show that every combinatorial 4-PPT is stretchable to a geometric pseudo-triangulation, which in general is not the case if faces may have size larger than 4. Moreover, we prove that the flip graph of combinatorial 4-PPTs is connected and has diameter $O(n^2)$, even in the case of labeled vertices with fixed outer face. For this case we provide an $Ω(n\log n)$ lower bound.
A new O(nlog(n)) algorithm is presented for performing Delaunay triangulation of sets of 2D points. The novel component of the algorithm is a radially propagating \emph{sweep-hull} (sequentially created from the radially sorted set of 2D points, giving a non-overlapping triangulation), paired with a final triangle flipping step to give the Delaunay triangluation. In empirical tests the algorithm runs in approximately half the time of q-hull for 2D Delaunay triangulation on randomly generated point sets.
The flip graph is the graph whose nodes correspond to non-isomorphic combinatorial triangulations and whose edges connect pairs of triangulations that can be obtained one from the other by flipping a single edge. In this note we show that the diameter of the flip graph is at least $\frac{7n}{3} + Θ(1)$, improving upon the previous $2n + Θ(1)$ lower bound.
We report on the implementation of an algorithm for computing the set of all regular triangulations of finitely many points in Euclidean space. This algorithm, which we call down-flip reverse search, can be restricted, e.g., to computing full triangulations only; this case is particularly relevant for tropical geometry. Most importantly, down-flip reverse search allows for massive parallelization, i.e., it scales well even for many cores. Our implementation allows to compute the triangulations of much larger point sets than before.
We generalize the notions of flippable and simultaneously flippable edges in a triangulation of a set S of points in the plane to so-called \emph{pseudo-simultaneously flippable edges}. Such edges are related to the notion of convex decompositions spanned by S. We prove a worst-case tight lower bound for the number of pseudo-simultaneously flippable edges in a triangulation in terms of the number of vertices. We use this bound for deriving new upper bounds for the maximal number of crossing-free straight-edge graphs that can be embedded on any fixed set of N points in the plane. We obtain new …
A realizer, commonly known as Schnyder woods, of a triangulation is a partition of its interior edges into three oriented rooted trees. A flip in a realizer is a local operation that transforms one realizer into another. Two types of flips in a realizer have been introduced: colored flips and cycle flips. A corresponding flip graph is defined for each of these two types of flips. The vertex sets are the realizers, and two realizers are adjacent if they can be transformed into each other by one flip. In this paper we study the relation between these two types of flips and their corresponding fl…
We consider whether any two triangulations of a polygon or a point set on a non-planar surface with a given metric can be transformed into each other by a sequence of edge flips. The answer is negative in general with some remarkable exceptions, such as polygons on the cylinder, and on the flat torus, and certain configurations of points on the cylinder.
We show that the triangulations of a finite point set form a flip graph that can be embedded isometrically into a hypercube, if and only if the point set has no empty convex pentagon. Point sets of this type include convex subsets of lattices, points on two lines, and several other infinite families. As a consequence, flip distance in such point sets can be computed efficiently.
Triangulations are an ubiquitous input for the finite element community. However, most raw triangulations obtained by imaging techniques are unsuitable as-is for finite element analysis. In this paper, we give a robust pipeline for handling those triangulations, based on the computation of a one-to-one parametrization for automatically selected patches of input triangles, which makes each patch amenable to remeshing by standard finite element meshing algorithms. Using only geometrical arguments, we prove that a discrete parametrization of a patch is one-to-one if (and only if) its image in the…
We describe a new algorithm for computing the Voronoi diagram of a set of $n$ points in constant-dimensional Euclidean space. The running time of our algorithm is $O(f \log n \log Δ)$ where $f$ is the output complexity of the Voronoi diagram and $Δ$ is the spread of the input, the ratio of largest to smallest pairwise distances. Despite the simplicity of the algorithm and its analysis, it improves on the state of the art for all inputs with polynomial spread and near-linear output size. The key idea is to first build the Voronoi diagram of a superset of the input points using ideas from Vorono…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；TU Eindhoven（埃因霍温理工大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）
A fundamental way to study 3-manifolds is through the geometric lens, one of the most prominent geometries being the hyperbolic one. We focus on the computation of a complete hyperbolic structure on a connected orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold with torus boundaries. This family of 3-manifolds includes the knot complements. This computation of a hyperbolic structure requires the resolution of gluing equations on a triangulation of the space, but not all triangulations admit a solution to the equations. In this paper, we propose a new method to find a triangulation that admits a solution to the …
In 1991, Edelsbrunner and Tan gave an O(n^2) algorithm for finding the MinMax Length triangulation of a set of points in the plane. In this paper we resolve one of the open problems stated in that paper, by showing that finding a MaxMin Length triangulation is an NP-complete problem. The proof implies that (unless P=NP), there is no polynomial-time approximation algorithm that can approximate the problem within any polynomial factor.
From its creation in 1989 through subsequent extensions, the widely-used "SnapPea census" now aims to represent all cusped finite-volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds that can be obtained from <= 8 ideal tetrahedra. Its construction, however, has relied on inexact computations and some unproven (though reasonable) assumptions, and so its completeness was never guaranteed. For the first time, we prove here that the census meets its aim: we rigorously certify that every ideal 3-manifold triangulation with <= 8 tetrahedra is either (i) homeomorphic to one of the census manifolds, or (ii) non-hyperbolic.…
