Papers › Approximate Vertex Enumeration
Approximate Vertex Enumeration
Andreas Löhne
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The problem to compute the vertices of a polytope given by affine inequalities is called vertex enumeration. The inverse problem, which is equivalent by polarity, is called the convex hull problem. We introduce `approximate vertex enumeration' as the problem to compute the vertices of a polytope which is close to the original polytope given by affine inequalities. In contrast to exact vertex enumerations, both polytopes are not required to be combinatorially equivalent. Two algorithms for this problem are introduced. The first one is an approximate variant of Motzkin's double description method. Only under certain strong conditions, which are not acceptable for practical reasons, we were able to prove correctness of this method for polytopes of arbitrary dimension. The second method, called shortcut algorithm, is based on constructing a plane graph and is restricted to polytopes of dimension 2 and 3. We prove correctness of the shortcut algorithm. As a consequence, we also obtain correctness of the approximate double description method, only for dimension 2 and 3 but without any restricting conditions as still required for higher dimensions. We show that for dimension 2 and 3 both algorithm remain correct if imprecise arithmetic is used and the computational error caused by imprecision is not too high. Both algorithms were implemented. The numerical examples motivate the approximate vertex enumeration problem by showing that the approximate problem is often easier to solve than the exact vertex enumeration problem. It remains open whether or not the approximate double description method (without any restricting condition) is correct for polytopes of dimension 4 and higher.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections