Related papers: Filling Crosswords is Very Hard
An unconstrained crossword puzzle is a generalization of the constrained crossword problem. In this problem, only the word vocabulary, and optionally the grid dimensions are known. Hence, it not only requires the algorithm to determine the…
We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…
This paper tackles the problem of the existence of solutions for recursive systems of Horn clauses with second-order variables interpreted as integer relations, and harnessed by quantifier-free difference bounds arithmetic. We start by…
We investigate the tractability of a simple fusion of two fundamental structures on graphs, a spanning tree and a perfect matching. Specifically, we consider the following problem: given an edge-weighted graph, find a minimum-weight…
We give an analog of the Myhill-Nerode methods from formal language theory for hypergraphs and use it to derive the following results for two NP-hard hypergraph problems: * We provide an algorithm for testing whether a hypergraph has…
Structural decomposition methods have been developed for identifying tractable classes of instances of fundamental problems in databases, such as conjunctive queries and query containment, of the constraint satisfaction problem in…
Two kinds of approximation algorithms exist for the k-BALANCED PARTITIONING problem: those that are fast but compute unsatisfying approximation ratios, and those that guarantee high quality ratios but are slow. In this paper we prove that…
Satisfiability of boolean formulae (SAT) has been a topic of research in logic and computer science for a long time. In this paper we are interested in understanding the structure of satisfiable and unsatisfiable sentences. In previous work…
In a typical regular expression (regex) crossword puzzle, you are given two nonempty lists $R_1,\ldots,R_m$ and $C_1,\ldots,C_n$ of regular expressions over some alphabet, and your goal is to fill in an $m\times n$ grid with letters from…
This paper establishes the exact comparison complexity of finding an element repeated $n$ times in a $2n$-element array containing $n+1$ distinct values, under the equality-comparison model with $O(1)$ extra space. We present a simple…
Many hard graph problems, such as Hamiltonian Cycle, become FPT when parameterized by treewidth, a parameter that is bounded only on sparse graphs. When parameterized by the more general parameter clique-width, Hamiltonian Cycle becomes…
We introduce and study the complexity of Path Packing. Given a graph $G$ and a list of paths, the task is to embed the paths edge-disjoint in $G$. This generalizes the well known Hamiltonian-Path problem. Since Hamiltonian Path is…
$H$-Packing is the problem of finding a maximum number of vertex-disjoint copies of $H$ in a given graph $G$. $H$-Partition is the special case of finding a set of vertex-disjoint copies that cover each vertex of $G$ exactly once. Our goal…
Deciding whether a graph can be embedded in a grid using only unit-length edges is NP-complete, even when restricted to binary trees. However, it is not difficult to devise a number of graph classes for which the problem is polynomial, even…
For an undirected graph G, we consider the following problems: given a fixed graph H, can we partition the vertices of G into two non-empty sets A and B such that neither the induced graph G[A] nor G[B] contain H (i) as a subgraph? (ii) as…
This paper shows the weighted matching problem on general graphs can be solved in time $O(n(m + n\log n))$ for $n$ and $m$ the number of vertices and edges, respectively. This was previously known only for bipartite graphs. The crux is a…
Grid graphs, and, more generally, $k\times r$ grid graphs, form one of the most basic classes of geometric graphs. Over the past few decades, a large body of works studied the (in)tractability of various computational problems on grid…
The dichotomy conjecture for the parameterized embedding problem states that the problem of deciding whether a given graph $G$ from some class $K$ of "pattern graphs" can be embedded into a given graph $H$ (that is, is isomorphic to a…
The maximum/minimum bisection problems are, given an edge-weighted graph, to find a bipartition of the vertex set into two sets whose sizes differ by at most one, such that the total weight of edges between the two sets is…
The {\em maximum cardinality} and {\em maximum weight matching} problems can be solved in time $\tilde{O}(m\sqrt{n})$, a bound that has resisted improvement despite decades of research. (Here $m$ and $n$ are the number of edges and…