Related papers: Solving the Rubik's Cube Optimally is NP-complete
Many practical problems in almost all scientific and technological disciplines have been classified as computationally hard (NP-hard or even NP-complete). In life sciences, combinatorial optimization problems frequently arise in molecular…
Spiral Galaxies is a pencil-and-paper puzzle played on a grid of unit squares: given a set of points called centers, the goal is to partition the grid into polyominoes such that each polyomino contains exactly one center and is 180{\deg}…
The maximum independent set problem is known to be NP-hard in the class of subcubic graphs, i.e. graphs of vertex degree at most 3. We present a polynomial-time solution in a subclass of subcubic graphs generalizing several previously known…
It is well-known that the question of whether a given finite region can be tiled with a given set of tiles is NP-complete. We show that the same is true for the right tromino and square tetromino on the square lattice, or for the right…
We provide a simple linear time transformation from a directed or undirected graph with labeled edges to an unlabeled digraph, such that paths in the input graph in which no two consecutive edges have the same label correspond to paths in…
We prove NP-completeness of Yin-Yang / Shiromaru-Kuromaru pencil-and-paper puzzles. Viewed as a graph partitioning problem, we prove NP-completeness of partitioning a rectangular grid graph into two induced trees (normal Yin-Yang), or into…
In this paper, we present the clockwise-algorithm that solves the extension in $k$-dimensions of the infamous nine-dot problem, the well-known two-dimensional thinking outside the box puzzle. We describe a general strategy that…
Finding Hamitonian Cycles in square grid graphs is a well studied and important questions. More recent work has extended these results to triangular and hexagonal grids, as well as further restricted versions. In this paper, we examine a…
We consider the problem of partitioning the edges of a graph into as few paths as possible. This is a~subject of the classic conjecture of Gallai and a recurring topic in combinatorics. Regarding the complexity of partitioning a graph…
The Hamiltonian cycle problem (HCP), which is an NP-complete problem, consists of having a graph G with n nodes and m edges and finding the path that connects each node exactly once. In this paper we compare some algorithms to solve a…
We consider the problem of covering a graph with a given number of induced subgraphs so that the maximum number of vertices in each subgraph is minimized. We prove NP-completeness of the problem, prove lower bounds, and give approximation…
We consider the problem of cutting a set of edges on a polyhedral manifold surface, possibly with boundary, to obtain a single topological disk, minimizing either the total number of cut edges or their total length. We show that this…
An $r$-simple $k$-path is a {path} in the graph of length $k$ that passes through each vertex at most $r$ times. The $r$-SIMPLE $k$-PATH problem, given a graph $G$ as input, asks whether there exists an $r$-simple $k$-path in $G$. We first…
The problem of finding an optimal vertex cover in a graph is a classic NP-complete problem, and is a special case of the hitting set question. On the other hand, the hitting set problem, when asked in the context of induced geometric…
A clique in an undirected graph G= (V, E) is a subset V' V of vertices, each pair of which is connected by an edge in E. The clique problem is an optimization problem of finding a clique of maximum size in graph. The clique problem is…
The problem of packing Hamilton cycles in random and pseudorandom graphs has been studied extensively. In this paper, we look at the dual question of covering all edges of a graph by Hamilton cycles and prove that if a graph with maximum…
Counting the number of Hamiltonian cycles that are contained in a geometric graph is {\bf \#P}-complete even if the graph is known to be planar \cite{lot:refer}. A relaxation for problems in plane geometric graphs is to allow the geometric…
For a graph $H$, the $H$-free Edge Deletion problem asks whether there exist at most $k$ edges whose deletion from the input graph $G$ results in a graph without any induced copy of $H$. We prove that $H$-free Edge Deletion is NP-complete…
The all-terminal reliability of a graph $G$ is the probability that $G$ remains connected when each edge fails independently with probability $p$. For fixed $n$ and $m$, the uniformly most reliable problem asks which graph with $n$ vertices…
The max-cut problem is a classical graph theory problem which is NP-complete. The best polynomial time approximation scheme relies on \emph{semidefinite programming} (SDP). We study the conditions under which graphs of certain classes have…