Related papers: On the NP-Completeness of Satisfying Certain Path …
We investigate a variety of problems of finding tours and cycle covers with minimum turn cost. Questions of this type have been studied in the past, with complexity and approximation results as well as open problems dating back to work by…
Upward planarity testing and Rectilinear planarity testing are central problems in graph drawing. It is known that they are both NP-complete, but XP when parameterized by treewidth. In this paper we show that these two problems are…
A picture-hanging puzzle is the task of hanging a framed picture with a wire around a set of nails in such a way that it can remain hanging on certain specified sets of nails, but will fall if any more are removed. The classical brain…
We thoroughly study a novel but basic combinatorial matrix completion problem: Given a binary incomplete matrix, fill in the missing entries so that every pair of rows in the resulting matrix has a Hamming distance within a specified range.…
Decomposition puzzles are pencil-and-paper logic puzzles that involve partitioning a rectangular grid into several regions to satisfy certain rules. In this paper, we construct a generic card-based protocol called printing protocol, which…
The field of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) studies homomorphism problems between relational structures where the target structure is fixed. Classifying the complexity of these problems has been a central quest of the field,…
Interpreting three-leaf binary trees or {\em rooted triples} as constraints yields an entailment relation, whereby binary trees satisfying some rooted triples must also thus satisfy others, and thence a closure operator, which is known to…
We study the problem of decomposing (clustering) a tree with respect to costs attributed to pairs of nodes, so as to minimize the sum of costs for those pairs of nodes that are in the same component (cluster). For the general case and for…
Given a graph with edge costs and vertex profits and given a budget B, the Orienteering Problem asks for a walk of cost at most B of maximum profit. Additionally, each profit may be given with a time window within it can be collected by the…
We show that every NP problem is polynomially equivalent to a simple combinatorial problem: the membership problem for a special class of digraphs. These classes are defined by means of shadows (projections) and by finitely many forbidden…
Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$. A path decomposition $\mathcal{P}$ of $G$ is a collection of edge-disjoint paths that covers all the edges of $G$. Let $p(G)$ denote the minimum number of paths needed in a path decomposition of $G$. Gallai…
Circular-arc graphs are the intersection graphs of arcs of a circle. The main result of this work describes the structure of all \emph{normalized intersection models} of circular-arc graphs. Normalized models of a circular-arc graph reflect…
The NP-complete problem Feedback Vertex Set is that of deciding whether or not it is possible, for a given integer $k\geq 0$, to delete at most $k$ vertices from a given graph so that what remains is a forest. The variant in which the…
We introduce the idea that the P vs NP problem can have a finer structure. Given the NP complete problem of interest, the configurations space of the problem can be divided in (at least) two regions. In one region, polynomial algorithms to…
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…
Dual decomposition provides a tractable framework for designing algorithms for finding the most probable (MAP) configuration in graphical models. However, for many real-world inference problems, the typical decomposition has a large…
An {\sf oriented perfect path double cover} ($\rm OPPDC$) of a graph $G$ is a collection of directed paths in the symmetric orientation $G_s$ of $G$ such that each edge of $G_s$ lies in exactly one of the paths and each vertex of $G$…
The hypergraph duality problem DUAL is defined as follows: given two simple hypergraphs $\mathcal{G}$ and $\mathcal{H}$, decide whether $\mathcal{H}$ consists precisely of all minimal transversals of $\mathcal{G}$ (in which case we say that…
The Dichotomy Conjecture for constraint satisfaction problems has been verified for conservative problems (or, equivalently, for list homomorphism problems) by Andrei Bulatov. An earlier case of this dichotomy, for list homomorphisms to…
A perfect matching cut is a perfect matching that is also a cutset, or equivalently a perfect matching containing an even number of edges on every cycle. The corresponding algorithmic problem, Perfect Matching Cut, is known to be…