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Moving a Ladder in Two Dimensions
- Visualization of a Lower Bound

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The purpose of this applet is to visualize a lower bound for any algorithm to compute a sequence of motions to move a ladder from a given source position to a given destination without penetrating known polygonial obstacles with a total of n vertices.

The computed scenario forces any algorithm to do not less than Ω(n2) movements (these are rotations and translations) in order to move the ladder along shortest path to reach its final position.

Possible actions are:

 

  • a left-click on one of the two vertices of the ladder rotates this vertex around the other
  • a right-click on one of the vertices rotates
    the ladder around a moveable rotation-centre
  • a left-click on the segment between the two in one dimension along the current direction limiting vertices of the ladder will move it
  • a right-click on the segment between the two limiting vertices of the ladder will move it in two dimensions along the current direction
  • the mouse-wheel can be used to perform the maximum movement possible along the current direction according to the direction the mouse-wheel
  • the rotation-centre can be moved by dragging the polygon

Example:

 

References:

[1] Y. Ke, J. O'Rourke. Moving a ladder in three dimensions: upper and lower bounds. 1987.

    siehe: ACM Portal (note: you need an account to download the article)

 

 

 

© University of Bonn, Computer Science I - - Last modified 09-02-2009 10:23