Characterizing and Recognizing Twistedness

In a simple drawing of a graph, any two edges intersect in at most one point (either a common endpoint or a proper crossing). A simple drawing is generalized twisted if it fulfills certain rather specific constraints on how the edges are drawn. An abstract rotation system of a graph assigns to each vertex a cyclic order of its incident edges. A realizable rotation system is one that admits a simple drawing such that at each vertex, the edges emanate in that cyclic order, and a generalized twisted rotation system can be realized as a generalized twisted drawing. Generalized twisted drawings have initially been introduced to obtain improved bounds on the size of plane substructures in any simple drawing of $K_n$. They have since gained independent interest due to their surprising properties. However, the definition of generalized twisted drawings is very geometric and drawing-specific. In this paper, we develop characterizations of generalized twisted drawings that enable a purely combinatorial view on these drawings and lead to efficient recognition algorithms. Concretely, we show that for any $n \geq 7$, an abstract rotation system of $K_n$ is generalized twisted if and only if all subrotation systems induced by five vertices are generalized twisted. This implies a drawing-independent and concise characterization of generalized twistedness. Besides, the result yields a simple $O(n^5)$-time algorithm to decide whether an abstract rotation system is generalized twisted and sheds new light on the structural features of simple drawings. We further develop a characterization via the rotations of a pair of vertices in a drawing, which we then use to derive an $O(n^2)$-time algorithm to decide whether a realizable rotation system is generalized twisted.