,
Jarosław Byrka
,
Marek Chrobak
,
Christian Coester
,
Łukasz Jeż
,
Elias Koutsoupias
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
We study online competitive algorithms for the line chasing problem in Euclidean spaces R^d, where the input consists of an initial point P_0 and a sequence of lines X_1, X_2, ..., X_m, revealed one at a time. At each step t, when the line X_t is revealed, the algorithm must determine a point P_t in X_t. An online algorithm is called c-competitive if for any input sequence the path P_0, P_1 , ..., P_m it computes has length at most c times the optimum path. The line chasing problem is a variant of a more general convex body chasing problem, where the sets X_t are arbitrary convex sets.
To date, the best competitive ratio for the line chasing problem was 28.1, even in the plane. We improve this bound by providing a simple 3-competitive algorithm for any dimension d. We complement this bound by a matching lower bound for algorithms that are memoryless in the sense of our algorithm, and a lower bound of 1.5358 for arbitrary algorithms. The latter bound also improves upon the previous lower bound of sqrt{2}~=1.412 for convex body chasing in 2 dimensions.
@InProceedings{bienkowski_et_al:LIPIcs.MFCS.2019.8,
author = {Bienkowski, Marcin and Byrka, Jaros{\l}aw and Chrobak, Marek and Coester, Christian and Je\.{z}, {\L}ukasz and Koutsoupias, Elias},
title = {{Better Bounds for Online Line Chasing}},
booktitle = {44th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2019)},
pages = {8:1--8:13},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-117-7},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2019},
volume = {138},
editor = {Rossmanith, Peter and Heggernes, Pinar and Katoen, Joost-Pieter},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2019.8},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-109521},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2019.8},
annote = {Keywords: convex body chasing, line chasing, competitive analysis}
}