Space-Time Trade-offs for Stack-Based Algorithms

In memory-constrained algorithms we have read-only access to the input, and the number of additional variables is limited. In this paper we introduce the compressed stack technique, a method that allows to transform algorithms whose space bottleneck is a stack into memory-constrained algorithms. Given an algorithm A that runs in O(n) time using a stack of length Theta(n), we can modify it so that it runs in O(n^2/2^s) time using a workspace of O(s) variables (for any s \in o(log n)) or O(n log n/log p)$ time using O(p log n/log p) variables (for any 2 <= p <= n). We also show how the technique can be applied to solve various geometric problems, namely computing the convex hull of a simple polygon, a triangulation of a monotone polygon, the shortest path between two points inside a monotone polygon, 1-dimensional pyramid approximation of a 1-dimensional vector, and the visibility profile of a point inside a simple polygon. Our approach exceeds or matches the best-known results for these problems in constant-workspace models (when they exist), and gives a trade-off between the size of the workspace and running time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general framework for obtaining memory-constrained algorithms.