The classic Ham-Sandwich theorem states that for any d measurable sets in ℝ^d, there is a hyperplane that bisects them simultaneously. An extension by Bárány, Hubard, and Jerónimo [DCG 2008] states that if the sets are convex and well-separated, then for any given α₁, … , α_d ∈ [0, 1], there is a unique oriented hyperplane that cuts off a respective fraction α₁, … , α_d from each set. Steiger and Zhao [DCG 2010] proved a discrete analogue of this theorem, which we call the α-Ham-Sandwich theorem. They gave an algorithm to find the hyperplane in time O(n (log n)^{d-3}), where n is the total number of input points. The computational complexity of this search problem in high dimensions is open, quite unlike the complexity of the Ham-Sandwich problem, which is now known to be PPA-complete (Filos-Ratsikas and Goldberg [STOC 2019]). Recently, Fearnley, Gordon, Mehta, and Savani [ICALP 2019] introduced a new sub-class of CLS (Continuous Local Search) called Unique End-of-Potential Line (UEOPL). This class captures problems in CLS that have unique solutions. We show that for the α-Ham-Sandwich theorem, the search problem of finding the dividing hyperplane lies in UEOPL. This gives the first non-trivial containment of the problem in a complexity class and places it in the company of classic search problems such as finding the fixed point of a contraction map, the unique sink orientation problem and the P-matrix linear complementarity problem.
@InProceedings{chiu_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.31, author = {Chiu, Man-Kwun and Choudhary, Aruni and Mulzer, Wolfgang}, title = {{Computational Complexity of the \alpha-Ham-Sandwich Problem}}, booktitle = {47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2020)}, pages = {31:1--31:18}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-138-2}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2020}, volume = {168}, editor = {Czumaj, Artur and Dawar, Anuj and Merelli, Emanuela}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.31}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-124382}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.31}, annote = {Keywords: Ham-Sandwich Theorem, Computational Complexity, Continuous Local Search} }
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