Convex hulls, oracles, and homology

This paper presents a new algorithm for the convex hull problem, which is based on a reduction to a combinatorial decision problem CompletenessC, which in turn can be solved by a simplicial homology computation. Like other convex hull algorithms, our algorithm is polynomial (in the size of input plus output) for simplicial or simple input. We show that the “no”-case of CompletenessC has a certificate that can be checked in polynomial time (if integrity of the input is guaranteed).