2021/02/16 by Damerius, Christoph, Kaaser, Dominik, Kling, Peter +1 · 1 citation
#Computational Geometry (cs.CG) #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2102.08181
Consider a set P of points in the unit square U, one of them being the origin. For each point p in P you may draw a rectangle in U with its lower-left corner in p. What is the maximum area such rectangles can cover without overlapping each other? Freedman [1969] posed this problem in 1969, asking whether one can always cover at least 50% of U. Over 40 years later, Dumitrescu and Tóth [2011] achieved the first constant coverage of 9.1%; since then, no significant progress was made. While 9.1% might seem low, the authors could not find any instance where their algorithm covers less than 50%, nourishing the hope to eventually prove a 50% bound. While we indeed significantly raise the algorithm's coverage to 39%, we extinguish the hope of reaching 50% by giving points for which the coverage is below 43.3%. Our analysis studies the algorithm's average and worst-case density of so-called tiles, which represent the area where a given point can freely choose its maximum-area rectangle. Our approachis comparatively general and may potentially help in analyzing related algorithms.