Problem 46565. Find an inscribed square on a closed curve

Created by Ned Gulley

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Here's an unproven conjecture from geometry: Every simple closed curve in a plane contains all four vertices of some square.
It's kind of remarkable. As far as we can tell right now, you can put at least one square on every single closed curve. Inspired by this, I made a simple discrete Cody-fied version of the problem. (And by the way, I'm not claiming it's mathematically equivalent...)
Given a list of points in [x y] format, return four indices into that list that form a square.
xy = [ 29    13
       41     7
       53    16
       58    48
       80    41
       78    85
       46    80
        7    46 ]
Then the answer would be the indices given in ix. These indices point to the rows that contain the four vertices of the square.
ix = [ 2 5 7 8 ]
You can return the indices in any order that honors the cycle around the square, and the answer is not necessarily unique. The test suite just verifies that what you return is indeed a square.

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Last Solution submitted on Nov 28, 2024

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ChrisR on 3 Nov 2024

Where is the square in the last test? The test passes with [1 3 5 7], but that's a rhombus. The angle test works because the dot products are 3, 3, -3, -3, and their sum is still zero. Perhaps checking that all dot products are zero (or less than a tolerance) would work.

Dyuman Joshi on 4 Nov 2024

Hello Chris, there is actually a typo from my side in the last test case.
Point #6 is supposed to be (1,-1) instead of (-1, 1) (which occurs twice).

I am unable to correct the test suite at this moment, I will update it inline with your feedback, as soon as I can.

Dyuman Joshi on 14 Nov 2024

Hello Chris, I have corrected the test case #7 and modified the test suite as per your suggestion.

Also, I have rescored the solutions.
It was interesting to see that quite a many solutions failed the last test case, incorrectly giving the rhombus as the solution
(i.e [1 3 5 7]).

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Problem 46565. Find an inscribed square on a closed curve

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Problem 46565. Find an inscribed square on a closed curve

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Last 200 Solutions

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