Nearly magic rectangles

Magic squares have been extremely useful and popular in combinatorics and statistics. One generalization of magic squares is magic rectangles which are useful for designing experiments in statistics. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of magic rectangles restricts the number of rows and columns to be either both odd or both even. In this paper, we generalize magic rectangles to even by odd nearly magic rectangles. We also prove necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a nearly magic rectangle, and construct one for each parameter set for which they exist.     

Optimal rectangle packing

We consider the NP-complete problem of finding an enclosing rectangle of minimum area that will contain a given a set of rectangles. We present two different constraint-satisfaction formulations of this problem. The first searches a space of absolute placements of rectangles in the enclosing rectangle, while the other searches a space of relative placements between pairs of rectangles. Both approaches dramatically outperform previous approaches to optimal rectangle packing. For problems where the rectangle dimensions have low precision, such as small integers, absolute placement is generally more efficient, whereas for rectangles with high-precision dimensions, relative placement will be more effective. In two sets of experiments, we find both the smallest rectangles and squares that can contain the set of squares of size 1×1, 2×2,…,N×N, for N up to 27. In addition, we solve an open problem dating to 1966, concerning packing the set of consecutive squares up to 24×24 in a square of size 70×70. Finally, we find the smallest enclosing rectangles that can contain a set of unoriented rectangles of size 1×2, 2×3, 3×4,…,N×(N+1), for N up to 25.     

平行四边形的3-剖分

It has been proved that if a rectangle is dissected into three congruent pieces,then those pieces must themselves be rectangles. In the present paper this result is generalized to the case of parallelogram.     

货物尺寸相同的2维装箱问题的等价类(英文)

在生产与储运领域,把小长方体货物（盒子）装入大长方体箱子是一项重要的工作.本文涉及的问题是:把相同尺寸（a×b×c）的盒子装到一个箱子X×Y×Z中,使所装入箱子的盒子数量为最大.由于某些条件的限止,有时要求货物只能按一个重力方向进行装箱,从而使装箱问题变为把尺寸相同的2维盒子（a×b）填装到一个2维箱子X×Y中.本文讨论当盒子尺寸（a×b包括 b×a）给定,箱子尺寸充分大时,在本文所给的等价意义下,共有多少种互不等价的箱子X×Y.     

用正交对角拉丁方及幻矩与和阵构作mn阶标准二次幻方

当m和n为同奇或同偶的正整数且m,n≠1,2,3,6时,用m和n阶正交对角拉丁方及{0,1,…,mn-1）上的m×n幻矩与和阵,构作了mn阶标准二次幻方．     

A construction for doubly pandiagonal magic squares

In this note, a doubly magic rectangle is introduced to construct a doubly pandiagonal magic square. A product construction for doubly magic rectangles is also presented. Infinite classes of doubly pandiagonal magic squares are then obtained, and an answer to problem 22 of [G. Abe, Unsolved problems on magic squares, Discrete Math. 127 (1994) 3] is given.     

Tiling by rectangles and alternating current

This paper is on tilings of polygons by rectangles. A celebrated physical interpretation of such tilings by R.L. Brooks, C.A.B. Smith, A.H. Stone and W.T. Tutte uses direct-current circuits. The new approach of this paper is an application of alternating-current circuits. The following results are obtained:

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a necessary condition for a rectangle to be tilable by rectangles of given shapes;

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a criterion for a rectangle to be tilable by rectangles similar to it but not all homothetic to it;

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a criterion for a “generic” polygon to be tilable by squares.

These results generalize those of C. Freiling, R. Kenyon, M. Laczkovich, D. Rinne, and G. Szekeres.     

Finding squares and rectangles in sets of points

A number of problems concerning sets of points in the plane are studied, e.g. establishing whether it contains a subset of size 4, which are the vertices of a square or rectangle. Both the problems of finding axis-parallel squares and rectangles, and arbitrarily oriented squares and rectangles are studied. Efficient algorithms are obtained for all of them. Furthermore, we investigate the generalizations tod-dimensional space, where the problem is to find hyperrectangles and hypercubes. Also, upper and lower bounds are given for combinatorial problems on the maxium number of subsets of size 4, of which the points are the vertices of a square or rectangle. Then we state an equivalence between the problem of finding rectangles, and the problem of findingK _{2, 2} subgraphs in bipartite graphs. Thus we immediately have an efficient algorithm for this graph problem.This work was partially supported by the ESPRIT Basic Research Action No. 3075 (project ALCOM). Work of the second author was also supported by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (N.W.O.).     

Dissecting a brick into bars

Consider the set of all lengths of sides of an N-dimensional parallelepiped. If this set has no more than k elements, the parallelepiped will be called a bar (the definition of a bar depends on k). We prove that a parallelepiped can be dissected into a finite number of bars if and only if the lengths of its sides span a linear space of dimension at most k over \mathbb Q{{\mathbb Q}} . This extends and generalizes a well-known theorem of Max Dehn about the splitting of rectangles into squares. Several other results about dissections of parallelepipeds are obtained.     

On the two-dimensional Knapsack Problem

We address the two-dimensional Knapsack Problem (2KP), aimed at packing a maximum-profit subset of rectangles selected from a given set into another rectangle. We consider the natural relaxation of 2KP given by the one-dimensional KP with item weights equal to the rectangle areas, proving the worst-case performance of the associated upper bound, and present and compare computationally four exact algorithms based on the above relaxation, showing their effectiveness.     

Generic rectangulations

A rectangulation is a tiling of a rectangle by a finite number of rectangles. The rectangulation is called generic if no four of its rectangles share a single corner. We initiate the enumeration of generic rectangulations up to combinatorial equivalence by establishing an explicit bijection between generic rectangulations and a set of permutations defined by a pattern-avoidance condition analogous to the definition of the twisted Baxter permutations.     

Improved local search algorithms for the rectangle packing problem with general spatial costs

The rectangle packing problem with general spatial costs is to pack given rectangles without overlap in the plane so that the maximum cost of the rectangles is minimized. This problem is very general, and various types of packing problems and scheduling problems can be formulated in this form. For this problem, we have previously presented local search algorithms using a pair of permutations of rectangles to represent a solution. In this paper, we propose speed-up techniques to evaluate solutions in various neighborhoods. Computational results for the rectangle packing problem and a real-world scheduling problem exhibit good prospects of the proposed techniques.     

On the Dissection of Rectangles into Right-Angled Isosceles Triangles

We consider the problem of dissecting a rectangle or a square into unequal right-angled isosceles triangles. This is regarded as a generalization of the well-known and much-solved problem of dissecting such figures into unequal squares. There is an analogous “electrical” theory but it is based on digraphs instead of graphs and has an appropriate modification of Kirchhoff's first law. The operation of reversing all edges in the digraph is found to be of great help in the construction of “perfect” dissected squares.     

4-Block heuristic for the rectangle packing problem

In this paper the rectangle packing problem (RPP) is considered. The RPP consists in finding a packing pattern of small rectangles within a larger rectangle such that the area utilization is maximized. We develop new heuristics for the RPP which are based on the G4-heuristic for the pallet loading problem. In addition to the general RPP we take also into account further restrictions which are of practical interest.     

Simple Perfect Squared Squares and

In this note tables of all simple perfect squared squares and simple perfect squared rectangles of order 26 are presented.

     

Local search algorithms for the rectangle packing problem with general spatial costs

We propose local search algorithms for the rectangle packing problem to minimize a general spatial cost associated with the locations of rectangles. The problem is to pack given rectangles without overlap in the plane so that the maximum cost of the rectangles is minimized. Each rectangle has a set of modes, where each mode specifies the width and height of the rectangle and its spatial cost function. The spatial costs are general piecewise linear functions which can be non-convex and discontinuous. Various types of packing problems and scheduling problems can be formulated in this form. To represent a solution of this problem, a pair of permutations of n rectangles is used to determine their horizontal and vertical partial orders, respectively. We show that, under the constraint specified by such a pair of permutations, optimal locations of the rectangles can be efficiently determined by using dynamic programming. The search for finding good pairs of permutations is conducted by local search and metaheuristic algorithms. We report computational results on various implementations using different neighborhoods, and compare their performance. We also compare our algorithms with other existing heuristic algorithms for the rectangle packing problem and scheduling problem. These computational results exhibit good prospects of the proposed algorithms. Key words.rectangle packing – sequence pair – general spatial cost – dynamic programming – metaheuristicsMathematics Subject Classification (1991):20E28, 20G40, 20C20     

A hybrid genetic algorithm-heuristic for a two-dimensional orthogonal packing problem

In this paper we address a two-dimensional (2D) orthogonal packing problem, where a fixed set of small rectangles has to be placed on a larger stock rectangle in such a way that the amount of trim loss is minimized. The algorithm we propose hybridizes a placement procedure with a genetic algorithm based on random keys. The approach is tested on a set of instances taken from the literature and compared with other approaches. The computation results validate the quality of the solutions and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

Polychromatic colorings of rectangular partitions

A rectangular partition is a partition of a plane rectangle into an arbitrary number of non-overlapping rectangles such that no four rectangles share a corner. In this note, it is proven that every rectangular partition admits a vertex coloring with four colors such that every rectangle, except possibly the outer rectangle, has all four colors on its boundary. This settles a conjecture of Dinitz et al. [Y. Dinitz, M.J. Katz, R. Krakovski, Guarding rectangular partitions, in: Abstracts 23rd Euro. Workshop Comput. Geom., 2007, pp. 30-33]. The proof is short, simple and based on 4-edge-colorability of a specific class of planar graphs.     

Triples of orthogonal Latin and Youden rectangles for small orders

We have performed a complete enumeration of nonisotopic triples of mutually orthogonal Latin rectangles for . Here we will present a census of such triples, classified by various properties, including the order of the autotopism group of the triple. As part of this, we have also achieved the first enumeration of pairwise orthogonal triples of Youden rectangles. We have also studied orthogonal triples of rectangles which are formed by extending mutually orthogonal triples with nontrivial autotopisms one row at a time, and requiring that the autotopism group is nontrivial in each step. This class includes a triple coming from the projective plane of order 8. Here we find a remarkably symmetrical pair of triples of rectangles, formed by juxtaposing two selected copies of complete sets of mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order 4.