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In real world applications, important resources like energy are saved by deliberately using so-called low-cost operations that are less reliable. Some of these approaches are based on a dual mode technology where it is possible to choose between high-energy operations (always correct) and low-energy operations (prone to errors), and thus enable to trade energy for correctness. In this work we initiate the study of algorithms for solving optimization problems that in their computation are allowed to choose between two types of operations: high-energy comparisons (always correct but expensive) and low-energy comparisons (cheaper but prone to errors). For the errors in low-energy comparisons, we assume the persistent setting, which usually makes it impossible to achieve optimal solutions without high-energy comparisons. We propose to study a natural complexity measure which accounts for the number of operations of either type separately. We provide a new family of algorithms which, for a fairly large class of maximization problems, return a constant approximation using only polylogarithmic many high-energy comparisons and only O(n log n) low-energy comparisons. This result applies to the class of p-extendible system s [Mestre, 2006], which includes several NP-hard problems and matroids as a special case (p=1). These algorithmic solutions relate to some fundamental aspects studied earlier in different contexts: (i) the approximation guarantee when only ordinal information is available to the algorithm; (ii) the fact that even such ordinal information may be erroneous because of low-energy comparisons and (iii) the ability to approximately sort a sequence of elements when comparisons are subject to persistent errors. Finally, our main result is quite general and can be parametrized and adapted to other error models.

We study the problem of designing a dictionary data structure that is resilient to memory corruptions. Our error model is a variation of the faulty RAM model in which, except for constant amount of definitely reliable memory, each memory word is randomly unreliable with a probability p < 1/2, and the locations of the unreliable words are unknown to the algorithm. An adversary observes the whole memory and can, at any time, arbitrarily corrupt (i.e., modify) the contents of one or more unreliable words. Our dictionary has capacity n, stores N

We consider the problem of sorting n elements in the case of persistent comparison errors. In this problem, each comparison between two elements can be wrong with some fixed (small) probability p, and comparisons cannot be repeated (Braverman and Mossel, SODA'08). Sorting perfectly in this model is impossible, and the objective is to minimize the dislocation of each element in the output sequence, that is, the difference between its true rank and its position. Existing lower bounds for this problem show that no algorithm can guarantee, with high probability, maximum dislocation and total dislocation better than Omega(log n) and Omega(n), respectively, regardless of its running time. In this paper, we present the first O(n log n)-time sorting algorithm that guarantees both O(log n) maximum dislocation and O(n) total dislocation with high probability. This settles the time complexity of this problem and shows that comparison errors do not increase its computational difficulty: a sequence with the best possible dislocation can be obtained in O(n log n) time and, even without comparison errors, Omega(n log n) time is necessary to guarantee such dislocation bounds. In order to achieve this optimality result, we solve two sub-problems in the persistent error comparisons model, and the respective methods have their own merits for further application. One is how to locate a position in which to insert an element in an almost-sorted sequence having O(log n) maximum dislocation in such a way that the dislocation of the resulting sequence will still be O(log n). The other is how to simultaneously insert m elements into an almost sorted sequence of m different elements, such that the resulting sequence of 2m elements remains almost sorted.

The geodesic Voronoi diagram of m point sites inside a simple polygon of n vertices is a subdivision of the polygon into m cells, one to each site, such that all points in a cell share the same nearest site under the geodesic distance. The best known lower bound for the construction time is Omega(n+m log m), and a matching upper bound is a long-standing open question. The state-of-the-art construction algorithms achieve O((n+m)log (n+m)) and O(n+m log m log^2n) time, which are optimal for m=Omega(n) and m=O(n/(log^3n)), respectively. In this paper, we give a construction algorithm with O(n+m(log m+log^2 n)) time, and it is nearly optimal in the sense that if a single Voronoi vertex can be computed in O(log n) time, then the construction time will become the optimal O(n+m log m). In other words, we reduce the problem of constructing the diagram in the optimal time to the problem of computing a single Voronoi vertex in O(log n) time.

We study the problem of sorting N elements in presence of persistent errors in comparisons: In this classical model, each comparison between two elements is wrong independently with some probability p, but repeating the same comparison gives always the same result. The best known algorithms for this problem have running time O(N^2) and achieve an optimal maximum dislocation of O(log N) for constant error probability. Note that no algorithm can achieve dislocation o(log N), regardless of its running time. In this work we present the first subquadratic time algorithm with optimal maximum dislocation: Our algorithm runs in tilde{O}(N^{3/2}) time and guarantees O(log N) maximum dislocation with high probability. Though the first version of our algorithm is randomized, it can be derandomized by extracting the necessary random bits from the results of the comparisons (errors).

We present a sorting algorithm for the case of recurrent random comparison errors. The algorithm essentially achieves simultaneously good properties of previous algorithms for sorting n distinct elements in this model. In particular, it runs in O(n^2) time, the maximum dislocation of the elements in the output is O(log n), while the total dislocation is O(n). These guarantees are the best possible since we prove that even randomized algorithms cannot achieve o(log n) maximum dislocation with high probability, or o(n) total dislocation in expectation, regardless of their running time.

Given a set of n sites in the plane, the order-k Voronoi diagram is a planar subdivision such that all points in a region share the same k nearest sites. The order-k Voronoi diagram arises for the k-nearest-neighbor problem, and there has been a lot of work for point sites in the Euclidean metric. In this paper, we study order-k Voronoi diagrams defined by an abstract bisecting curve system that satisfies several practical axioms, and thus our study covers many concrete order-k Voronoi diagrams. We propose a randomized incremental construction algorithm that runs in O(k(n-k) log^2 n +n log^3 n) steps, where O(k(n-k)) is the number of faces in the worst case. Due to those axioms, this result applies to disjoint line segments in the L_p norm, convex polygons of constant size, points in the Karlsruhe metric, and so on. In fact, this kind of run time with a polylog factor to the number of faces was only achieved for point sites in the L_1 or Euclidean metric before.