Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:

Jean Cardinal, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Shinji Imahori, Stefan Langerman, and Ryuhei Uehara, “Algorithmic Folding Complexity”, in Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2009), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 5878, Hawaii, USA, December 16–18, 2009, pages 452–461.

Abstract:

How do we most quickly fold a paper strip (modeled as a line) to obtain a desired mountain-valley pattern of equidistant creases (viewed as a binary string)? Define the folding complexity of a mountain-valley string as the minimum number of simple folds required to construct it. We show that the folding complexity of a length-n uniform string (all mountains or all valleys), and hence of a length-n pleat (alternating mountain/valley), is polylogarithmic in n. We also show that the maximum possible folding complexity of any string of length n is O(n/lg n), meeting a previously known lower bound.

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