Direct Sampling of Confined Polygons in Linear Time
Abstract
Abstract. We present an algorithm for sampling tightly confined random equilateral closed polygons in three-space which has runtime linear in the number of edges. Using symplectic geometry, sampling such polygons reduces to sampling a moment polytope, and in our confinement model this polytope turns out to be natural from a combinatorial point of view. This connection to combinatorics yields both our fast sampling algorithm and explicit formulas for the expected distances of vertices to the origin. We use our algorithm to investigate the expected total curvature of confined polygons, leading to a very precise conjecture for the asymptotics of total curvature.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Computational Geometry and Mesh Generation
Publication details
- Journal / source
- SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 505–535
- Publication date
- 7 April 2026
- Language
- EN