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Tightness is a generalisation of the notion of convexity: a space is tight if and only if it is "as convex as possible", given its topological constraints. For a simplicial complex, deciding tightness has a straightforward exponential time algorithm, but more efficient methods to decide tightness are only known in the trivial setting of triangulated surfaces. In this article, we present a new polynomial time procedure to decide tightness for triangulations of 3-manifolds - a problem which previously was thought to be hard. In addition, for the more difficult problem of deciding tightness of 4-dimensional combinatorial manifolds, we describe an algorithm that is fixed parameter tractable in the treewidth of the 1-skeletons of the vertex links. Finally, we show that simpler treewidth parameters are not viable: for all non-trivial inputs, we show that the treewidths of both the 1-skeleton and the dual graph must grow too quickly for a standard treewidth-based algorithm to remain tractable.
@InProceedings{bagchi_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2016.12,
author = {Bagchi, Bhaskar and Datta, Basudeb and Burton, Benjamin A. and Singh, Nitin and Spreer, Jonathan},
title = {{Efficient Algorithms to Decide Tightness}},
booktitle = {32nd International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2016)},
pages = {12:1--12:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-009-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2016},
volume = {51},
editor = {Fekete, S\'{a}ndor and Lubiw, Anna},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2016.12},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-59040},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2016.12},
annote = {Keywords: discrete geometry and topology, polynomial time algorithms, fixed parameter tractability, tight triangulations, simplicial complexes}
}