Lower bounds for fundamental geometric problems
Jeffrey Gordon Erickson, Raimund Seidel · 1996
We develop lower bounds on the number of primitive operations required to solve several fundamental problems in computational geometry. For example, given a set of points in the plane, are any three colinear? Given a set of points and lines, does any point lie on a line? These and similar questions arise as subproblems or special cases of a large number of more complicated geometric problems, including point location, range searching, motion planning, collision detection, ray shooting, and hidden surface removal. Previously these problems were studied only in general models of computation, but known techniques for these models are too weak to prove useful results. Our approach is to consider, for each problem, a more specialized model of computation that is still rich enough to describe all known algorit...