Related papers: The Complexity of Finding Tangles

Consider a problem where we are given a bipartite graph H with vertices arranged on two horizontal lines in the plane, such that the two sets of vertices placed on the two lines form a bipartition of H. We additionally require that H admits…

We prove that deciding if a diagram of the unknot can be untangled using at most $k$ Riedemeister moves (where $k$ is part of the input) is NP-hard. We also prove that several natural questions regarding links in the $3$-sphere are NP-hard,…

Packing graphs is a combinatorial problem where several given graphs are being mapped into a common host graph such that every edge is used at most once. In the planar tree packing problem we are given two trees T1 and T2 on n vertices and…

A planar Tangle is a smooth simple closed curve piecewise defined by quadrants of circles with constant curvature. We can enumerate Tangles by counting their dual graphs, which consist of a certain family of polysticks. The number of…

Data with low-dimensional nonlinear structure are ubiquitous in engineering and scientific problems. We study a model problem with such structure -- a binary classification task that uses a deep fully-connected neural network to classify…

We consider the problem of deciding whether a polygonal knot in 3-dimensional Euclidean space is unknotted, capable of being continuously deformed without self-intersection so that it lies in a plane. We show that this problem, {\sc…

We introduce the notion of a network's conduciveness, a probabilistically interpretable measure of how the network's structure allows it to be conducive to roaming agents, in certain conditions, from one portion of the network to another.…

Multi-layer graphs consist of several graphs (layers) over the same vertex set. They are motivated by real-world problems where entities (vertices) are associated via multiple types of relationships (edges in different layers). We chart the…

We study tangle replacement in the context of spatial graphs. The main results show that, for certain spatial handcuff graphs, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the neighborhood equivalence classes of the spatial graphs obtained…

We study algorithmic aspects of bending wires and sheet metal into a specified structure. Problems of this type are closely related to the question of deciding whether a simple non-self-intersecting wire structure (a carpenter's ruler) can…

We show how an image can, in principle, be described by the tangles of the graph of its pixels. The tangle-tree theorem provides a nested set of separations that efficiently distinguish all the distinguishable tangles in a graph. This…

We prove two dichotomy results for detecting long paths as patterns in a given graph. The NP-hard problem Longest Induced Path is to determine the longest induced path in a graph. The NP-hard problem Longest Path Contractibility is to…

We show that computing the interleaving distance between two multi-graded persistence modules is NP-hard. More precisely, we show that deciding whether two modules are $1$-interleaved is NP-complete, already for bigraded, interval…

A proper labeling of a graph is an assignment of integers to some elements of a graph, which may be the vertices, the edges, or both of them, such that we obtain a proper vertex coloring via the labeling subject to some conditions. The…

We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…

Many combinatorial problems can be formulated as "Can I transform configuration 1 into configuration 2, if certain transformations only are allowed?". An example of such a question is: given two k-colourings of a graph, can I transform the…

Covering all edges of a graph by a small number of vertices, this is the NP-complete Vertex Cover problem. It is among the most fundamental graph-algorithmic problems. Following a recent trend in studying temporal graphs (a sequence of…

Inspired by artistic practices such as beadwork and himmeli, we study the problem of threading a single string through a set of tubes, so that pulling the string forms a desired graph. More precisely, given a connected graph (where edges…

We define a plane curve to be threadable if it can rigidly pass through a point-hole in a line L without otherwise touching L. Threadable curves are in a sense generalizations of monotone curves. We have two main results. The first is a…

In the Segment Intersection Graph Representation Problem, we want to represent the vertices of a graph as straight line segments in the plane such that two segments cross if and only if there is an edge between the corresponding vertices.…