– Mastering Left and Right – Different Approaches to a Problem That Is Not Straight Forward

Abstract

Reasoning over spatial descriptions involving relations that can be described as left, right and inline has been studied extensively during the last two decades. While the fundamental nature of these relations makes reasoning about them applicable to a number of interesting problems, it also makes reasoning about them computationally hard. The key question of whether a given description using these relations can be realized is as hard as deciding satisfiability in the existential theory of the reals. In this paper we summarize the semi-decision procedures proposed so far and present the results of a random benchmark illustrating the relative effectiveness and efficiency of these procedures.