Optimal map construction of an unknown torus

In this paper we consider the map construction problem in the case of an anonymous, unoriented torus of unknown size. An agent that can move from node to neighbouring node in the torus is initially placed in an arbitrary node and has to construct an edge-labeled map. In other words, it has to draw in its local memory an edge-labeled torus isomorphic to the one it is moving on. The agent has enough local memory to represent the torus and one or two tokens that can be dropped on and picked up from nodes. Efficiency is measured in terms of number of moves performed by the agent. When the agent has no token available, the problem is clearly unsolvable. In the paper we show that, when the agent has one token available there exists an optimal algorithm for constructing the map of the torus; the agent, in fact, performs /spl Theta/(N) moves (where N is the number of nodes of the torus). Before showing the optimal solution with the optimal number of tokens, we describe a simpler solution that works when two tokens are available, we then modify it to obtain the same bound when the agent has only one token available.