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A Superlinear Lower Bound on the Number of 5-Holes

Authors Oswin Aichholzer, Martin Balko, Thomas Hackl, Jan Kyncl, Irene Parada, Manfred Scheucher, Pavel Valtr, Birgit Vogtenhuber

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Keywords
  • Erdös-Szekeres type problem
  • k-hole
  • empty k-gon
  • empty pentagon
  • planar point set

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Abstract

Let P be a finite set of points in the plane in general position, that is, no three points of P are on a common line. We say that a set H of five points from P is a 5-hole in P if H is the vertex set of a convex 5-gon containing no other points of P. For a positive integer n, let h_5(n) be the minimum number of 5-holes among all sets of n points in the plane in general position.

Despite many efforts in the last 30 years, the best known asymptotic lower and upper bounds for h_5(n) have been of order Omega(n) and O(n^2), respectively. We show that h_5(n) = Omega(n(log n)^(4/5)), obtaining the first superlinear lower bound on h_5(n).

The following structural result, which might be of independent interest, is a crucial step in the proof of this lower bound. If a finite set P of points in the plane in general position is partitioned by a line l into two subsets, each of size at least 5 and not in convex position, then l intersects the convex hull of some 5-hole in P. The proof of this result is computer-assisted.

Cite As Get BibTex

Oswin Aichholzer, Martin Balko, Thomas Hackl, Jan Kyncl, Irene Parada, Manfred Scheucher, Pavel Valtr, and Birgit Vogtenhuber. A Superlinear Lower Bound on the Number of 5-Holes. In 33rd International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 77, pp. 8:1-8:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2017.8

Author Details

Oswin Aichholzer
Martin Balko
Thomas Hackl
Jan Kyncl
Irene Parada
Manfred Scheucher
Pavel Valtr
Birgit Vogtenhuber

References

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