Flip Graph Connectivity for Arrangements of Pseudolines and Pseudocircles

Flip graphs of combinatorial and geometric objects are at the heart of many deep structural insights and connections between different branches of discrete mathematics and computer science. They also provide a natural framework for the study of reconfiguration problems. We study flip graphs of arrangements of pseudolines and of arrangements of pseudocircles, which are combinatorial generalizations of lines and circles, respectively. In both cases we consider triangle flips as local transformation and prove conjectures regarding their connectivity. In the case of n pseudolines we show that the connectivity of the flip graph equals its minimum degree, which is exactly n − 2. For the proof we introduce the class of shellable line arrangements, which serve as reference objects for the construction of disjoint paths. In fact, shellable arrangements are elements of a flip graph of line arrangements which are vertices of a polytope (Felsner and Ziegler; DM 241 (2001), 301-312). This polytope forms a cluster of good connectivity in the flip graph of pseudolines. In the case of pseudocircles we show that triangle flips induce a connected flip graph on intersecting arrangements and also on cylindrical intersecting arrangements. The result for cylindrical arrangements is used in the proof for intersecting arrangements. We also show that in both settings the diameter of the flip graph is in Θ(n³). Our constructions make essential use of variants of the sweeping lemma for pseudocircle arrangements (Snoeyink and Hershberger; Proc. SoCG 1989: 354-363). We finally study cylindrical arrangements in their own right and provide new combinatorial characterizations of this class.