ARRIVAL: A zero-player graph game in NP $\cap$ coNP
Abstract
Suppose that a train is running along a railway network, starting from a designated origin, with the goal of reaching a designated destination. The network, however, is of a special nature: every time the train traverses a switch, the switch will change its position immediately afterwards. Hence, the next time the train traverses the same switch, the other direction will be taken, so that directions alternate with each traversal of the switch. Given a network with origin and destination, what is the complexity of deciding whether the train, starting at the origin, will eventually reach the destination? It is easy to see that this problem can be solved in exponential time, but we are not aware of any polynomial-time method. In this short paper, we prove that the problem is in NP coNP. This raises the question whether we have just failed to find a (simple) polynomial-time solution, or whether the complexity status is more subtle, as for some other well-known (two-player) graph games.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1605.03546,
title = {ARRIVAL: A zero-player graph game in NP $\cap$ coNP},
author = {Jérôme Dohrau and Bernd Gärtner and Manuel Kohler and Jiří Matoušek and Emo Welzl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.03546},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
6 pages, 3 figures; final version is due to be published in the collection of papers "A Journey through Discrete Mathematics. A Tribute to Ji\v{r}\'i Matou\v{s}ek" edited by Martin Loebl, Jaroslav Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il and Robin Thomas, due to be published by Springer