Covering compact metric spaces greedily

10/16/2017

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by   Jan Hendrik Rolfes, et al.

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A general greedy approach to construct coverings of compact metric spaces by metric balls is given and analyzed. The analysis is a continuous version of Chvátal's analysis of the greedy algorithm for the weighted set cover problem. The approach is demonstrated in an exemplary manner to construct efficient coverings of the n-dimensional sphere and n-dimensional Euclidean space to give short and transparent proofs of several best known bounds obtained from deterministic constructions in the literature on sphere coverings.