Related papers: The Complexity of Change
The "reconfiguration problem" for circular colourings asks, given two $(p,q)$-colourings $f$ and $g$ of a graph $G$, is it possible to transform $f$ into $g$ by changing the colour of one vertex at a time such that every intermediate…
This paper describes several new problems and ideas concerning algebraic geometry and complexity theory. It first uses the idea of coloring graphs with elements of finite fields. This procedure then shows that graph coloring problems can be…
Graph parameters such as the clique number, the chromatic number, and the independence number are central in many areas, ranging from computer networks to linguistics to computational neuroscience to social networks. In particular, the…
Number partitioning is one of the classical NP-hard problems of combinatorial optimization. It has applications in areas like public key encryption and task scheduling. The random version of number partitioning has an "easy-hard" phase…
A $k$-coloring of a graph is an assignment of integers between $1$ and $k$ to vertices in the graph such that the endpoints of each edge receive different numbers. We study a local variation of the coloring problem, which imposes further…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
A graph $G$ is {\em $k$-choosable} if for every assignment of a set $S(v)$ of $k$ colors to every vertex $v$ of $G$, there is a proper coloring of $G$ that assigns to each vertex $v$ a color from $S(v)$. We consider the complexity of…
Given a set of obstacles and two points, is there a path between the two points that does not cross more than $k$ different obstacles? This is a fundamental problem that has undergone a tremendous amount of work. It is known to be NP-hard,…
We tackle the problem of simultaneous transformations of networks represented as graphs. Roughly speaking, one may distinguish two kinds of simultaneous or parallel rewrite relations over complex structures such as graphs: (i) those which…
In combinatorial reconfiguration, the reconfiguration problems on a vertex subset (e.g., an independent set) are well investigated. In these problems, some tokens are placed on a subset of vertices of the graph, and there are three natural…
We prove several results about the complexity of the role colouring problem. A role colouring of a graph $G$ is an assignment of colours to the vertices of $G$ such that two vertices of the same colour have identical sets of colours in…
A partition $(V_1,\ldots,V_k)$ of the vertex set of a graph $G$ with a (not necessarily proper) colouring $c$ is colourful if no two vertices in any $V_i$ have the same colour and every set $V_i$ induces a connected graph. The COLOURFUL…
The Colouring problem asks whether the vertices of a graph can be coloured with at most $k$ colours for a given integer $k$ in such a way that no two adjacent vertices receive the same colour. A graph is $(H_1,H_2)$-free if it has no…
The Rainbow k-Coloring problem asks whether the edges of a given graph can be colored in $k$ colors so that every pair of vertices is connected by a rainbow path, i.e., a path with all edges of different colors. Our main result states that…
We study the complexity of graph modification problems with respect to homomorphism-based colouring properties of edge-coloured graphs. A homomorphism from edge-coloured graph $G$ to edge-coloured graph $H$ is a vertex-mapping from $G$ to…
We show that the problem to decide whether two (convex) polytopes, given by their vertex-facet incidences, are combinatorially isomorphic is graph isomorphism complete, even for simple or simplicial polytopes. On the other hand, we give a…
NP-complete problems should be hard on some instances but those may be extremely rare. On generic instances many such problems, especially related to random graphs, have been proven easy. We show the intractability of random instances of a…
Over the past decade, physicists have developed deep but non-rigorous techniques for studying phase transitions in discrete structures. Recently, their ideas have been harnessed to obtain improved rigorous results on the phase transitions…
Reconfiguring two shortest paths in a graph means modifying one shortest path to the other by changing one vertex at a time so that all the intermediate paths are also shortest paths. This problem has several natural applications, namely:…
Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with…