Minimum Spanning Trees for Square Crop Plots

Abstract

Motivated by accessing crop plots in a field, where each crop plot can only be visited by a given pair of entry/exit points (we have three different types, each having four cases), we study the corresponding Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) problem of such a planar set of axis-aligned unit squares. It turns out that this crop plot distance does not satisfy triangle inequality, even though the whole setup of the problem is geometric. Hence additional care must be taken. The main results of this paper are as follows: (1) we prove that computing the MST of a set $P$ of unit squares under the crop plot distance is NP-hard, (2) the MST of $P$ can be approximated with a factor-4 approximation.