

Sign up
Here's how it works:
  1. Anybody can ask a question
  2. Anybody can answer

If there are $8$ random points in the plane whose horizontal coordinate and vertical coordinate are uniformly distributed on the open interval $\left(0,1\right)$, what is the expected largest size of a subset in which the points form the vertices of a convex polygon? Thanks!

share|cite|improve this question
By the way, "size" only means cardinality here. – user0o Jan 17 '13 at 20:14
Related: – Sam Hopkins Jan 17 '13 at 20:22
Also posted to… originally with $16$ points, then edited to $4$ points. – Gerry Myerson Jan 17 '13 at 22:02
Probability distribution not clear: Are the points independent? For a given point, are the horizontal and vertical coordinates independent? – Gerald Edgar Jan 19 '13 at 13:35
Dear Gerald, yes, the random points are independent, and for a given point, the horizontal and vertical coordinates are also independent. Thank you for your questions that make this clear. – user0o Jan 21 '13 at 7:06

For specific and not very small $n$ this would be quit a messy computation.

There are esults about the asymptotics for large $n$ in a paper of Ambrus and Barany . They consider a slightly different problem, but their methods work and the result is $c n^{1/3}$ for some computable $c$.

Note also that they compute the typical value, which is only a lower bound for the expectation. Various concentration inequalities which apply since the points are iid can be used to get the expectation as well. (Or you could try to get a large deviation estimate directly.)

share|cite|improve this answer
Dear Omer, thank you for your answer, but do you know if the exponent would change for other convex regions? since they only considered a triangle. – user0o Jan 25 '13 at 3:46
The exponent would not change. For example, take random points in a circular disk. Fit a triangle in the disk. A constant fraction of the n points falls inside the triangle (w.h.p.), and thus you get at least $c′n^{1/3}$ points in convex position; similarly, an ellipse (affine image of a disk) fits into any triangle, showing the other direction of the inequality. Any two convex shapes are related like this (after affine transformation). – Günter Rote Apr 28 '13 at 23:15

Your Answer


