The dilation of the Delaunay triangulation is greater than π/2

Abstract

Consider the Delaunay triangulation T of a set P of points in the plane as a Euclidean graph, in which the weight of every edge is its length. It has long been conjectured that the dilation in T of any pair p, p \in P, which is the ratio of the length of the shortest path from p to p' in T over the Euclidean distance ||pp'||, can be at most π/2 \approx 1.5708. In this paper, we show how to construct point sets in convex position with dilation > 1.5810 and in general position with dilation > 1.5846. Furthermore, we show that a sufficiently large set of points drawn independently from any distribution will in the limit approach the worst-case dilation for that distribution.

12 pages, 6 figures, invited to the special edition of Computational Geometry Theory and Applications for papers from CCCG 2009