Happy Ending: An Empty Hexagon in Every Set of 30 Points

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Heule, Marijn J. H., Scheucher, Manfred
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Heule, Marijn J. H.
Scheucher, Manfred
author_facet Heule, Marijn J. H.
Scheucher, Manfred
contents Satisfiability solving has been used to tackle a range of long-standing open math problems in recent years. We add another success by solving a geometry problem that originated a century ago. In the 1930s, Esther Klein's exploration of unavoidable shapes in planar point sets in general position showed that every set of five points includes four points in convex position. For a long time, it was open if an empty hexagon, i.e., six points in convex position without a point inside, can be avoided. In 2006, Gerken and Nicolás independently proved that the answer is no. We establish the exact bound: Every 30-point set in the plane in general position contains an empty hexagon. Our key contributions include an effective, compact encoding and a search-space partitioning strategy enabling linear-time speedups even when using thousands of cores.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_00737
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Happy Ending: An Empty Hexagon in Every Set of 30 Points
Heule, Marijn J. H.
Scheucher, Manfred
Computational Geometry
Logic in Computer Science
Combinatorics
Satisfiability solving has been used to tackle a range of long-standing open math problems in recent years. We add another success by solving a geometry problem that originated a century ago. In the 1930s, Esther Klein's exploration of unavoidable shapes in planar point sets in general position showed that every set of five points includes four points in convex position. For a long time, it was open if an empty hexagon, i.e., six points in convex position without a point inside, can be avoided. In 2006, Gerken and Nicolás independently proved that the answer is no. We establish the exact bound: Every 30-point set in the plane in general position contains an empty hexagon. Our key contributions include an effective, compact encoding and a search-space partitioning strategy enabling linear-time speedups even when using thousands of cores.
title Happy Ending: An Empty Hexagon in Every Set of 30 Points
topic Computational Geometry
Logic in Computer Science
Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00737