Mittagsseminar (in cooperation with A. Steger, D. Steurer and B. Sudakov)

Date and Time: Thursday, May 28, 2015, 12:15 pm

Duration: 30 minutes

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Vincent Kusters

The Complexity of Simultaneous Geometric Graph Embedding

Given a collection of planar graphs $G_1,\dots,G_k$ on the same set $V$ of $n$ vertices, the simultaneous geometric embedding (with mapping) problem, or simply $k$-SGE, is to find a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane and a bijection $\phi: V \to P$ such that the induced straight-line drawings of $G_1,\dots,G_k$ under $\phi$ are all plane.

This problem is polynomial-time equivalent to weak rectilinear realizability of abstract topological graphs, which Kyncl (doi:10.1007/s00454-010-9320-x) proved to be complete for $\exists\mathbb{R}$, the existential theory of the reals. Hence the problem $k$-SGE is polynomial-time equivalent to several other problems in computational geometry, such as recognizing intersection graphs of line segments or finding the rectilinear crossing number of a graph.

We give an elementary reduction from the order type realizability problem to $k$-SGE, with the property that both numbers $k$ and $n$ are linear in the number of points. This implies not only the $\exists\mathbb{R}$-hardness result, but also a $2^{2^{\Omega (n)}}$ lower bound on the minimum size of a grid on which any such simultaneous embedding can be drawn. This bound is tight. Hence there exists such collections of graphs that can be simultaneously embedded, but every simultaneous drawing requires an exponential number of bits per coordinates. The best value that can be extracted from Kyncl's proof is only $2^{2^{\Omega (\sqrt{n})}}$.

Joint work with Jean Cardinal.

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