Given n points in 2d plane, calculate the number of right triangles that can be formed using these n points
Answers
Algorithm
Following are the detailed steps of a O(n (Logn)^2) algortihm.
Input: An array of n points P[]
Output: The smallest distance between two points in the given array.
As a pre-processing step, the input array is sorted according to x coordinates.
1) Find the middle point in the sorted array, we can take P[n/2] as middle point.
2) Divide the given array in two halves. The first subarray contains points from P[0] to P[n/2]. The second subarray contains points from P[n/2+1] to P[n-1].
3) Recursively find the smallest distances in both subarrays. Let the distances be dl and dr. Find the minimum of dl and dr. Let the minimum be d.
4) From the above 3 steps, we have an upper bound d of minimum distance. Now we need to consider the pairs such that one point in pair is from the left half and the other is from the right half. Consider the vertical line passing through P[n/2] and find all points whose x coordinate is closer than d to the middle vertical line. Build an array strip[] of all such points.