NP-Hardness of the Problem of Optimal Box Positioning

Abstract

We consider the problem of finding a position of a d-dimensional box with given edge lengths that maximizes the number of enclosed points of the given finite set P ⊂ R d , i.e., the problem of optimal box positioning. We prove that while this problem is polynomial for fixed values of d, it is NP-hard in the general case. The proof is based on a polynomial reduction technique applied to the considered problem and the 3-CNF satisfiability problem.