XYZ GeoBench: A Program Library for Geometric Computation

Professor Jurg Nievergelt, Informatik, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland

DATE: Friday, February 23, 1996

TIME: 10:30 AM

PLACE: 100 Shaffer Hall Johns Hopkins University - Homewood Campus

ABSTRACT: The project XYZ (eXperimental geometrY Zurich) aims to develop practically useful software for geometric computation, and to test it in a variety of applications. In pursuing these goals we emphasize the following points: 1. Exploit recent progress in computational geometry through a systematic study to determine classes of algorithms that lend themselves to robust and practically efficient programs. Our program library contains many standard algorithms for 2-d problems, several for restricted 3-d problems, and a few for d-dimensional geometry. 2. Verify and evaluate algorithms experimentally: We study the problem of consistency in the presence of numerical errors, and emphasize robust programs that handle all degenerate cases; we often implement and compare different algorithms for the same problem. 3. Use state-of-the-art software engineering techniques in a workbench that supports the development of a library of production-quality programs: The XYZ GeoBench (written in Object Pascal for the Macintosh) is a loosely coupled collection of modules held together by a class hierarchy of geometric objects and common abstract data types. 4. The GeoBench is being used in education as a programming environment for rapid prototyping and visualization of geometric algorithms. Other application projects are underway: Molecular modeling using the Distance Geometry approach, interfacing the GeoBench as a "geometry engine" to a spatial data base system, and planning the allocation of spatial resources. (Sponsored by Center for Geometric Computing) _____________________________________________________________________ For further information, Phone: 516-8577 Email: secretaries@blaze.cs.jhu.edu URL: gopher://gopher.cs.jhu.edu/1/colloquiums