Halving Balls in Deterministic Linear Time
Michael M. Hoffmann, Vincent J. J. Kusters, Tillmann Miltzow · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2014
Let $\D$ be a set of $n$ pairwise disjoint unit balls in $\R^d$ and $P$ the set of their center points. A hyperplane $\Hy$ is an \emph{$m$-separator} for $\D$ if each closed halfspace bounded by $\Hy$ contains at least $m$ points from $P$. This generalizes the notion of halving hyperplanes, which correspond to $n/2$-separators. The analogous notion for point sets has been well studied. Separators have various applications, for instance, in divide-and-conquer schemes. In such a scheme any ball that is intersected by the separating hyperplane may still interact with both sides of the partition. Therefore it is desirable that the separating hyperplane intersects a small number of balls only. We present three deterministic algorithms to bisect or approximately bisect a given set of disjoint unit balls by a hyperplane: Firstly, we present a simple linear-time algorithm to construct an $αn$-separator for balls in $\R^d$, for any $0