Irv Kenneth Diggit works for a company that excavates trenches, digs holes and generally tears up people’s yards. Irv’s job is to make sure that no underground pipe or cable is underneath where excavation is planned. He has several different maps, one for each utility company, showing where their conduits lie, and he needs to draw one large, consolidated map combining them all. One approach would be to simply draw each of the smaller maps one at a time onto the large map. However, this often wastes time, not to mention ink for the pen-plotter in the office, since in many cases portions of the conduits overlap with each other (albeit at different depths underground). What Irv wants is a way to determine the minimum number of line segments to draw given all the line segments from the separate maps.