Safe and Effective Determinant Evaluation.pdfVIP

Safe and Effective Determinant Evaluation Kenneth L. Clarkson ATT Bell Laboratories Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974 e-mail: clarkson@ February 25, 1994 Abstract The problem of evaluating the sign of the determinant of a small matrix arises in many geometric algorithms. Given an n × n matrix A with integer entries, whose columns are all smaller than M in Eu- clidean norm, the algorithm given here evaluates the sign of the deter- minant det A exactly. The algorithm requires an arithmetic precision of less than 1.5n + 2 lg M bits. The number of arithmetic operations needed 3 2 is O(n ) + O(n ) log OD(A)/β, where OD(A)| det A | is the product of the lengths of the columns of A, and β is the number of “extra” bits of precision, min{lg(1/u) − 1.1n − 2 lg n − 2, lg N − lg M − 1.5n − 1}, where u is the roundoff error in approximate arithmetic, and N is the largest representable integer. Since OD(A) ≤ M n , the algorithm requires 3 3 O(n lg M ) time, and O(n ) time when β = Ω(log M ). 1 Introduction Many geometric algorithms require the evaluations of the determinants of small matrices, and testing the signs (±) of such determinants. Such testing is fun- damental to algorithms for finding convex hulls, arrangements of lines and line segments and hyperplanes, Voronoi diagrams, and many others. By such nu- merical tests, a combinatorial structure is defined. If the tests are incorrect, the resulting structure may be wildly different from a