We revisit Hopcroft’s problem and related fundamental problems about geometric range searching. Given n points and n lines in the plane, we show how to count the number of point-line incidence pairs or the number of point-above-line pairs in O ( n 4/3 ) time, which matches the conjectured lower bound and improves the best previous time bound of \(n^{4/3}2^{O(\log ^*n)}\) obtained almost 30 years ago by Matoušek [ 58 ]. We describe two interesting and different ways to achieve the result: The first is randomized and uses a new two-dimensional version of fractional cascading for arrangements of lines; the second is deterministic and uses decision trees in a manner inspired by the sorting technique of Fredman [42]. The second approach extends to any constant dimension. Many consequences follow from these new ideas: For example, we obtain an O ( n 4/3 )-time algorithm for line segment intersection counting in the plane, O ( n 4/3 )-time randomized algorithms for distance selection in the plane and bichromatic closest pair and Euclidean minimum spanning tree in three or four dimensions, and a randomized data structure for halfplane range counting in the plane with O ( n 4/3 ) preprocessing time and space and \(O(n^{1/3})\) query time.
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