On Testing and Robust Characterizations of Convexity

A body K ? ?? is convex if and only if the line segment between any two points in K is completely contained within K or, equivalently, if and only if the convex hull of a set of points in K is contained within K. We show that neither of those characterizations of convexity are robust: there are bodies in ?? that are far from convex - in the sense that the volume of the symmetric difference between the set K and any convex set C is a constant fraction of the volume of K - for which a line segment between two randomly chosen points x,y ? K or the convex hull of a random set X of points in K is completely contained within K except with exponentially small probability. These results show that any algorithms for testing convexity based on the natural line segment and convex hull tests have exponential query complexity