Untangling Graphs on Surfaces

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Main Authors: de Verdière, Éric Colin, Despré, Vincent, Dubois, Loïc
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author de Verdière, Éric Colin
Despré, Vincent
Dubois, Loïc
author_facet de Verdière, Éric Colin
Despré, Vincent
Dubois, Loïc
contents Consider a graph drawn on a surface (for example, the plane minus a finite set of obstacle points), possibly with crossings. We provide an algorithm to decide whether such a drawing can be untangled, namely, if one can slide the vertices and edges of the graph on the surface (avoiding the obstacles) to remove all crossings; in other words, whether the drawing is homotopic to an embedding. While the problem boils down to planarity testing when the surface is the sphere or the disk (or equivalently the plane without any obstacle), the other cases have never been studied before, except when the input graph is a cycle, in an abundant literature in topology and more recently by Despré and Lazarus [SoCG 2017, J. ACM 2019]. Our algorithm runs in O(m + poly(g+b) n log n) time, where g >= 0 and b >= 0 are the genus and the number of boundary components of the input orientable surface S, and n is the size of the input graph drawing, lying on some fixed graph of size m cellularly embedded on S. We use various techniques from two-dimensional computational topology and from the theory of hyperbolic surfaces. Most notably, we introduce reducing triangulations, a novel discrete analog of hyperbolic surfaces in the spirit of systems of quads by Lazarus and Rivaud [FOCS 2012] and Erickson and Whittlesey [SODA 2013], which have the additional benefit that reduced paths are unique and stable upon reversal; they are likely of independent interest. Tailored data structures are needed to achieve certain homotopy tests efficiently on these triangulations. As a key subroutine, we rely on an algorithm to test the weak simplicity of a graph drawn on a surface by Akitaya, Fulek, and Tóth [SODA 2018, TALG 2019].
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_00437
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Untangling Graphs on Surfaces
de Verdière, Éric Colin
Despré, Vincent
Dubois, Loïc
Computational Geometry
Data Structures and Algorithms
05C10, 57M15, 57N05, 68Q25, 68R10, 68W05, 14E25
Consider a graph drawn on a surface (for example, the plane minus a finite set of obstacle points), possibly with crossings. We provide an algorithm to decide whether such a drawing can be untangled, namely, if one can slide the vertices and edges of the graph on the surface (avoiding the obstacles) to remove all crossings; in other words, whether the drawing is homotopic to an embedding. While the problem boils down to planarity testing when the surface is the sphere or the disk (or equivalently the plane without any obstacle), the other cases have never been studied before, except when the input graph is a cycle, in an abundant literature in topology and more recently by Despré and Lazarus [SoCG 2017, J. ACM 2019]. Our algorithm runs in O(m + poly(g+b) n log n) time, where g >= 0 and b >= 0 are the genus and the number of boundary components of the input orientable surface S, and n is the size of the input graph drawing, lying on some fixed graph of size m cellularly embedded on S. We use various techniques from two-dimensional computational topology and from the theory of hyperbolic surfaces. Most notably, we introduce reducing triangulations, a novel discrete analog of hyperbolic surfaces in the spirit of systems of quads by Lazarus and Rivaud [FOCS 2012] and Erickson and Whittlesey [SODA 2013], which have the additional benefit that reduced paths are unique and stable upon reversal; they are likely of independent interest. Tailored data structures are needed to achieve certain homotopy tests efficiently on these triangulations. As a key subroutine, we rely on an algorithm to test the weak simplicity of a graph drawn on a surface by Akitaya, Fulek, and Tóth [SODA 2018, TALG 2019].
title Untangling Graphs on Surfaces
topic Computational Geometry
Data Structures and Algorithms
05C10, 57M15, 57N05, 68Q25, 68R10, 68W05, 14E25
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00437