Finding Geometric Representations of Apex Graphs is NP-Hard

Planar graphs can be represented as intersection graphs of different types of geometric objects in the plane, e.g., circles (Koebe, 1936), line segments (Chalopin & Gonçalves, 2009), L-shapes (Gonçalves et al., 2018). Furthermore, these representations can be obtained in polynomial time when the planar graph is provided as input. For general graphs, however, even deciding whether such representations exist is often NP-hard. We consider apex graphs, i.e., graphs that can be made planar by removing one vertex from them. We show, somewhat surprisingly, that deciding whether geometric representations exist for apex graphs is NP-hard. More precisely, we show that recognizing every graph class G which satisfies PURE-2-DIR ⊆ G ⊆ 1-STRING is NP-hard, even when the input graphs are apex graphs. Here, PURE-2-DIR is the class of intersection graphs of axis-parallel line segments (where intersections are allowed only between horizontal and vertical segments) and 1-STRING is the class of intersection graphs of simple curves (where two curves share at most one point) in the plane. Most of the known NP-hardness reductions for these problems are from variants of 3-SAT. We reduce from PLANAR HAMILTONIAN PATH COMPLETION, which uses the more intuitive notion of planarity. As a result, our proof is much simpler and encapsulates several classes of geometric graphs.

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