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

Date and Time: Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:15 pm

Duration: 45 minutes

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Stephan Seebacher

Simple Wriggling is Hard unless You Are a Fat Hippo

Given a polygonal domain P with holes in it and two points s,f in P, is there a thick s-f path? Specifically, can a thick snake slither from the startpoint s to the food f?
We prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether two points in P can be connected with a wire. On the positive side, we show that snake's problem is length-tractable: if the sanke is fat, i.e. its length/width ratio is small, the shortest path can be computed in polynomial time.

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