Hamiltonian alternating paths on bicolored double-chains

Abstract

We find arbitrarily large finite sets S of points in general position in the plane with the following property. If the points of S are equitably 2-colored (i.e., the sizes of the two color classes differ by at most one), then there is a polygonal line consisting of straight-line segments with endpoints in S, which is Hamiltonian, non-crossing, and alternating (i.e., each point of S is visited exactly once, every two non-consecutive segments are disjoint, and every segment connects points of different colors). We show that the above property holds for so-called double-chains with each of the two chains containing at least one fifth of all the points. Our proof is constructive and can be turned into a linear-time algorithm. On the other hand, we show that the above property does not hold for double-chains in which one of the chains contains at most ≈∈1/29 of all the points. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.