Draining a Polygon - or - Rolling a Ball out of a Polygon

We introduce the problem of draining water (or balls representing water drops) out of a punctured polygon (or a polyhedron) by rotating the shape. For 2D polygons, we obtain combinatorial bounds on the number of holes needed, both for arbitrary polygons and for special classes of polygons. We detail an O(n2 log n) algorithm that finds the minimum number of holes needed for a given polygon, and argue that the complexity remains polynomial for polyhedra in 3D. We make a start at characterizing the 1-drainable shapes, those that only need one hole.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CCCG
• Authors: Greg Aloupis, Jean Cardinal, Sébastien Collette, Ferran Hurtado, Stefan Langerman, Joseph O'Rourke
• Keywords: Arbitrary Polygons, Balls Representing Water, CCCG 2008, Computational Geometry, Punctured Polygon