Time-Space Trade-off Algorithms for Triangulating a Simple Polygon

Abstract

An $s$-workspace algorithm is an algorithm that has read-only access to the values of the input, write-only access to the output, and only uses $O(s)$ additional words of space. We present a randomized $s$-workspace algorithm for triangulating a simple polygon $P$ of $n$ vertices that runs in $O(n^2/s+n\log n{\log }^5(n/s))$ expected time using $O(s)$ variables, for any $s\le n$. In particular, when $s\le \frac{n}{\log n{\log }^5\log n}$ the algorithm runs in $O(n^2/s)$ expected time.

14 pages, 4 figures, 1 algorithm