English

Graph Homomorphism Reconfiguration and Frozen $H$-Colourings

Combinatorics 2017-12-04 v1 Computational Complexity Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

For a fixed graph HH, the reconfiguration problem for HH-colourings (i.e. homomorphisms to HH) asks: given a graph GG and two HH-colourings φ\varphi and ψ\psi of GG, does there exist a sequence f0,,fmf_0,\dots,f_m of HH-colourings such that f0=φf_0=\varphi, fm=ψf_m=\psi and fi(u)fi+1(v)E(H)f_i(u)f_{i+1}(v)\in E(H) for every 0i<m0\leq i<m and uvE(G)uv\in E(G)? If the graph GG is loop-free, then this is the equivalent to asking whether it possible to transform φ\varphi into ψ\psi by changing the colour of one vertex at a time such that all intermediate mappings are HH-colourings. In the affirmative, we say that φ\varphi reconfigures to ψ\psi. Currently, the complexity of deciding whether an HH-colouring φ\varphi reconfigures to an HH-colouring ψ\psi is only known when HH is a clique, a circular clique, a C4C_4-free graph, or in a few other cases which are easily derived from these. We show that this problem is PSPACE-complete when HH is an odd wheel. An important notion in the study of reconfiguration problems for HH-colourings is that of a frozen HH-colouring; i.e. an HH-colouring φ\varphi such that φ\varphi does not reconfigure to any HH-colouring ψ\psi such that ψφ\psi\neq \varphi. We obtain an explicit dichotomy theorem for the problem of deciding whether a given graph GG admits a frozen HH-colouring. The hardness proof involves a reduction from a CSP problem which is shown to be NP-complete by establishing the non-existence of a certain type of polymorphism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.00200,
  title  = {Graph Homomorphism Reconfiguration and Frozen $H$-Colourings},
  author = {Richard C. Brewster and Jae-Baek Lee and Benjamin Moore and Jonathan A. Noel and Mark Siggers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.00200},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

21 pages, 3 figures