Cutting hyperplanes for divide-and-conquer (Q1209837)

A \((1/r)\)-cutting for a set of \(n\) hyperplanes in \(E^ d\) is the cover of the space by \(d\)-simplices with disjoint interiors such that the interior of each simplex intersects at most \(n/r\) hyperplanes. This structure leads to efficient solutions for many geometric problems, and a number of probabilistic and deterministic algorithms have been proposed for construction of cuttings. The paper presents a deterministic algorithm for computing a \((1/r)\)- cutting of \(O(r^ d)\) size in \(O(nr^{d-1})\) time. This leads to improvements in algorithms for a number of geometric problems, e.g., counting segment intersections, line/point incidence counting, point location. In addition, a simplified version of Clarkson's algorithm for linear programming in fixed dimension is given (with no direct relevance to cuttings, however).