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Tight Bounds for Illuminating and Covering of Orthotrees with Vertex Lights and Vertex Beacons

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Abstract

We consider two variants of the Art Gallery Problem: illuminating orthotrees with a minimum set of vertex lights, and covering orthotrees with a minimum set of vertex beacons. An orthotree P is a simply connected orthogonal polyhedron that is the union of a set S of cuboids glued face to face such that the graph whose vertices are the cuboids of S, two of which are adjacent if they share a common face, is a tree. A point p illuminates a point \(q \in P\) if the line segment \(\ell\) joining them is contained in P. A beacon b is a point in P that pulls other points in P towards itself similarly to the way a magnet attracts ferrous particles. We say that a beacon bcoversp if when b starts pulling p, p does not get stuck at a point of P before it reaches b. This happens, for instance if p reaches a point \(p'\) such that there is an \(\epsilon >0\) such that any point in P at distance at most \(\epsilon\) from \(p'\) is farther away from \(p'\) than q (there is another pathological case that we will not detail in this abstract). In this paper we prove that any orthotree P with n vertices can be illuminated using at most \(\lfloor n/8 \rfloor\) light sources placed at vertices of P, and that all of the points in P can always be covered with at most \(\lfloor n/12 \rfloor\) vertex beacons. Both bounds are tight.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referee for his careful reading and comments of paper. His suggestions helped us to improve the readability of our paper.

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Correspondence to I. Aldana-Galván.

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J. Urrutia was partially supported by PAPIIT Grant IN102117 from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

I. Aldana-Galván, J.L. Álvarez-Rebollar, J.C. Catana-Salazar, N. Marín, and E. Solís-Villarreal were partially supported by PAEP from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

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Aldana-Galván, I., Álvarez-Rebollar, J.L., Catana-Salazar, J.C. et al. Tight Bounds for Illuminating and Covering of Orthotrees with Vertex Lights and Vertex Beacons. Graphs and Combinatorics 36, 617–630 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00373-020-02141-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00373-020-02141-4

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