Improved upper and lower bounds for the point placement problem

The point placement problem is to determine the positions of a set of $n$ distinct points, P = {p1, p2, p3, ..., pn}, on a line uniquely, up to translation and reflection, from the fewest possible distance queries between pairs of points. Each distance query corresponds to an edge in a graph, called point placement graph ppg, whose vertex set is P. The uniqueness requirement of the placement translates to line rigidity of the ppg. In this paper we show how to construct in 2 rounds a line rigid point placement graph of size 9n/7 + O(1). This improves the existing best result of 4n/3 + O(1). We also improve the lower bound on 2-round algorithms from 17n/16 to 9n/8.

Algorithms for the Problems of Length-Constrained Heaviest Segments

We present algorithms for length-constrained maximum sum segment and maximum density segment problems, in particular, and the problem of finding length-constrained heaviest segments, in general, for a sequence of real numbers. Given a sequence of n real numbers and two real parameters L and U (L <= U), the maximum sum segment problem is to find a consecutive subsequence, called a segment, of length at least L and at most U such that the sum of the numbers in the subsequence is maximum. The maximum density segment problem is to find a segment of length at least L and at most U such that the density of the numbers in the subsequence is the maximum. For the first problem with non-uniform width there is an algorithm with time and space complexities in O(n). We present an algorithm with time complexity in O(n) and space complexity in O(U). For the second problem with non-uniform width there is a combinatorial solution with time complexity in O(n) and space complexity in O(U). We present a simple geometric algorithm with the same time and space complexities. We extend our algorithms to respectively solve the length-constrained k maximum sum segments problem in O(n+k) time and O(max{U, k}) space, and the length-constrained $k$ maximum density segments problem in O(n min{k, U-L}) time and O(U+k) space. We present extensions of our algorithms to find all the length-constrained segments having user specified sum and density in O(n+m) and O(nlog (U-L)+m) times respectively, where m is the number of output. Previously, there was no known algorithm with non-trivial result for these problems. We indicate the extensions of our algorithms to higher dimensions. All the algorithms can be extended in a straight forward way to solve the problems with non-uniform width and non-uniform weight.