Suppose that there is a family of random points for , independently and uniformly distributed in the square of area . We do not see these points, but learn about them in one of the following two ways. Suppose first that we are given the corresponding random geometric graph , where distinct vertices and are adjacent when the Euclidean distance is at most . If the threshold distance satisfies , then the following holds with high probability. Given the graph (without any geometric information), in polynomial time we can approximately reconstruct the hidden embedding, in the sense that, `up to symmetries', for each vertex we find a point within distance about of ; that is, we find an embedding with `displacement' at most about . Now suppose that, instead of being given the graph , we are given, for each vertex , the ordering of the other vertices by increasing Euclidean distance from . Then, with high probability, in polynomial time we can find an embedding with the much smaller displacement error .
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