Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:

Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, and Craig S. Kaplan, “Polygons Cuttable by a Circular Saw”, in Proceedings of the 12th Annual Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2000), Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, August 16–18, 2000, pages 1–6.

Abstract:

We introduce and characterize a new class of polygons that models wood, stone, glass, and ceramic shapes that can be cut with a table saw, lapidary trim saw, or other circular saw. In this model, a circular saw is a line segment (in projection) that can move freely in empty space, but can only cut straight into a portion of material. Once a region of material is separated from the rest, it can be picked up and removed to allow the saw to move more freely. A polygon is called cuttable by a circular saw if it can be cut out of a convex shape of material by a sufficiently small circular saw. We prove that a polygon has this property precisely if it does not have two adjacent reflex vertices.

Comments:

This paper is also available from the electronic proceedings as http://www.cs.unb.ca/conf/cccg/eProceedings/36.ps.gz.

Length:

The paper is 6 pages and the talk is 25 minutes.

Availability:

The paper is available in PostScript (307k).

See information on file formats.

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