Reconfiguration of Polygonal Subdivisions via Recombination
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Motivated by the problem of redistricting, we study area-preserving reconfigurations of connected subdivisions of a simple polygon. A connected subdivision of a polygon ℛ, called a district map, is a set of interior disjoint connected polygons called districts whose union equals ℛ. We consider the recombination as the reconfiguration move which takes a subdivision and produces another by merging two adjacent districts, and by splitting them into two connected polygons of the same area as the original districts. The complexity of a map is the number of vertices in the boundaries of its districts. Given two maps with k districts, with complexity O(n), and a perfect matching between districts of the same area in the two maps, we show constructively that (log n)^O(log k) recombination moves are sufficient to reconfigure one into the other. We also show that Ω(log n) recombination moves are sometimes necessary even when k=3, thus providing a tight bound when k=O(1).
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