The following generalisation of the Erdős unit distance problem was recently suggested by Palsson, Senger and Sheffer. For a sequence δ=(δ₁,… ,δ_k) of k distances, a (k+1)-tuple (p₁,… ,p_{k+1}) of distinct points in ℝ^d is called a (k,δ)-chain if ‖p_j-p_{j+1}‖ = δ_j for every 1 ≤ j ≤ k. What is the maximum number C_k^d(n) of (k,δ)-chains in a set of n points in ℝ^d, where the maximum is taken over all δ? Improving the results of Palsson, Senger and Sheffer, we essentially determine this maximum for all k in the planar case. It is only for k ≡ 1 (mod 3) that the answer depends on the maximum number of unit distances in a set of n points. We also obtain almost sharp results for even k in dimension 3.
@InProceedings{frankl_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2020.48, author = {Frankl, N\'{o}ra and Kupavskii, Andrey}, title = {{Almost Sharp Bounds on the Number of Discrete Chains in the Plane}}, booktitle = {36th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2020)}, pages = {48:1--48:15}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-143-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2020}, volume = {164}, editor = {Cabello, Sergio and Chen, Danny Z.}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2020.48}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-122064}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2020.48}, annote = {Keywords: unit distance problem, unit distance graphs, discrete chains} }
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