From a broad perspective, we study issues related to implementation,
testing, and experimentation in the context of geometric algorithms.
Our focus is on the effect of quality of implementation on
experimental results. More concisely, we study algorithms that
compute convex hulls for a multiset of points in the plane.
We introduce several
improvements to the implementations of the studied algorithms:
plane-sweep, torch, quickhull, and
throw-away. With a new set of space-efficient
implementations, the experimental results—in the integer-arithmetic
setting—are different from those of earlier studies.
From this, we conclude that utmost care is needed
when doing experiments and when trying to draw solid conclusions upon them.
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BibLATEX:
@article{GK2018J,
author = {Ask Neve Gamby and Jyrki Katajainen},
title = {Convex-hull algorithms: {I}mplementation, testing, and
experimentation},
journaltitle = {Algorithms},
volume = {11},
number = {12},
year = {2018},
articleno = {195},
}