Recognizing Penny and Marble Graphs is Hard for Existential Theory of the Reals

Abstract

We show that the recognition problem for penny graphs (contact graphs of unit disks in the plane) is $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete, that is, computationally as hard as the existential theory of the reals, even if a combinatorial plane embedding of the graph is given. The exact complexity of the penny graph recognition problem has been a long-standing open problem. We lift the penny graph result to three dimensions and show that the recognition problem for marble graphs (contact graphs of unit balls in three dimensions) is $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete. Finally, we show that rigidity of penny graphs is $\forall\mathbb{R}$-complete and look at grid embeddings of penny graphs that are trees.