The Prophet and the Voronoi Diagram

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Har-Peled, Sariel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917434725761024
author Har-Peled, Sariel
author_facet Har-Peled, Sariel
contents Consider a stream of $n$ random points (say, from the unit square) arriving one by one, where a player has to make an irreversible immediate decision for each arriving point whether to pick it. The player has to pick a single point, and the payoff is the area of the cell of the picked point, in the final Voronoi diagram of \emph{all} the points. We show that there is a simple strategy so that with probability $\geq 1 - \tilde O(1/\sqrt{n})$, the player's payoff is only a constant factor smaller than the optimal choice (i.e., the one made by the prophet). This competitiveness is somewhat surprising, as this payoff is larger by a factor of $Θ( \log n)$ than the average payoff.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_23021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Prophet and the Voronoi Diagram
Har-Peled, Sariel
Computational Geometry
Consider a stream of $n$ random points (say, from the unit square) arriving one by one, where a player has to make an irreversible immediate decision for each arriving point whether to pick it. The player has to pick a single point, and the payoff is the area of the cell of the picked point, in the final Voronoi diagram of \emph{all} the points. We show that there is a simple strategy so that with probability $\geq 1 - \tilde O(1/\sqrt{n})$, the player's payoff is only a constant factor smaller than the optimal choice (i.e., the one made by the prophet). This competitiveness is somewhat surprising, as this payoff is larger by a factor of $Θ( \log n)$ than the average payoff.
title The Prophet and the Voronoi Diagram
topic Computational Geometry
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23021