A Tight Lower Bound for Computing the Diameter of a 3D Convex Polytope

The diameter of a set P of n points in ℝ ^d is the maximum Euclidean distance between any two points in P. If P is the vertex set of a 3-dimensional convex polytope, and if the combinatorial structure of this polytope is given, we prove that, in the worst case, deciding whether the diameter of P is smaller than 1 requires Ω(nlog n) time in the algebraic computation tree model. It shows that the O(nlog n) time algorithm of Ramos for computing the diameter of a point set in ℝ³ is optimal for computing the diameter of a 3-polytope. We also give a linear time reduction from Hopcroft’s problem of finding an incidence between points and lines in ℝ² to the diameter problem for a point set in ℝ⁷.     

The Complexity of Finding SUBSEQ(<Emphasis Type="Italic">A</Emphasis>)

Higman showed that if A is any language then SUBSEQ(A) is regular. His proof was nonconstructive. We show that the result cannot be made constructive. In particular we show that if f takes as input an index e of a total Turing Machine M _e , and outputs a DFA for SUBSEQ(L(M _e )), then ∅″≤_T f (f is Σ ₂-hard). We also study the complexity of going from A to SUBSEQ(A) for several representations of A and SUBSEQ(A).