We prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether two points in a polygonal domain with holes can be connected by a wire. This implies that finding any approximation to the shortest path for a long snake amidst polygonal obstacles is NP-hard. On the positive side, we show that snake's problem is "length-tractable": if the snake is "fat", i.e., its length/width ratio is small, the shortest path can be computed in polynomial time. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
CITATION STYLE
Kostitsyna, I., & Polishchuk, V. (2010). Simple wriggling is hard unless you are a fat hippo. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 6099 LNCS, pp. 272–283). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13122-6_27
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