Related papers: The Gapped $k$-Deck Problem
Our main point of focus is the set of closed geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces. For any fixed integer $k$, we are interested in the set of all closed geodesics with at least $k$ (but possibly more) self-intersections. Among these, we…
A maximal geodesic in a graph is a geodesic (alias shortest path) which is not a subpath of a longer geodesic. The geodesic-transversal problem in a graph $G$ is introduced as the task to find a smallest set $S$ of vertices of $G$ such that…
Given a graph $G = (V,E)$, a set $T$ of vertex pairs, and an integer $k$, Hitting Geodesic Intervals asks whether there is a set $S \subseteq V$ of size at most $k$ such that for each terminal pair $\{u,v\} \in T$, the set $S$ intersects at…
For a finite abelian group $G$ and a positive integer $k$, let $\mathsf{D}_k(G)$ denote the smallest integer $\ell$ such that each sequence over $G$ of length at least $\ell$ has $k$ disjoint nontrivial zero-sum subsequences. It is known…
In the Set Cover problem, we are given a set system with each set having a weight, and we want to find a collection of sets that cover the universe, whilst having low total weight. There are several approaches known (based on greedy…
Given an undirected graph $G$, the Densest $k$-subgraph problem (DkS) asks to compute a set $S \subset V$ of cardinality $\left\lvert S\right\rvert \leq k$ such that the weight of edges inside $S$ is maximized. This is a fundamental NP-hard…
This paper introduces a new family of reconstruction codes which is motivated by applications in DNA data storage and sequencing. In such applications, DNA strands are sequenced by reading some subset of their substrings. While previous…
We develop a topological framework for proving lower bounds on sign-rank via $\mathbb{Z}_2$-equivariant topology, and use it to resolve the sign-rank of the Gap Hamming Distance problem up to lower-order terms. For every (partial) sign…
In the Shortest Common Superstring problem (SCS), one needs to find the shortest superstring for a set of strings. While SCS is NP-hard and MAX-SNP-hard, the Greedy Algorithm "choose two strings with the largest overlap; merge them; repeat"…
Let $G$ be a complete edge-weighted graph on $n$ vertices. To each subset of vertices of $G$ assign the cost of the minimum spanning tree of the subset as its weight. Suppose that $n$ is a multiple of some fixed positive integer $k$. The…
We consider the problem of finding small distance-preserving subgraphs of undirected, unweighted interval graphs with $k$ terminal vertices. To start with, we show that finding an optimal distance-preserving subgraph is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard…
Palindromes are non-empty strings that read the same forward and backward. The problem of recognizing strings that can be represented as the concatenation of even-length palindromes, the concatenation of palindromes of length at least two,…
We consider string matching with variable length gaps. Given a string $T$ and a pattern $P$ consisting of strings separated by variable length gaps (arbitrary strings of length in a specified range), the problem is to find all ending…
We explore a reconfiguration version of the dominating set problem, where a dominating set in a graph $G$ is a set $S$ of vertices such that each vertex is either in $S$ or has a neighbour in $S$. In a reconfiguration problem, the goal is…
Let $G=(V,E)$ and $H$ be two graphs. Packing problem is to find in $G$ the largest number of independent subgraphs each of which is isomorphic to $H$. Let $U\subset{V}$. If the graph $G-U$ has no subgraph isomorphic to $H$, $U$ is a cover…
For an integer $k \ge 1$, a (distance) $k$-dominating set of a connected graph $G$ is a set $S$ of vertices of $G$ such that every vertex of $V(G) \setminus S$ is at distance at most~$k$ from some vertex of $S$. The $k$-domination number,…
A subset S of vertices of a graph G is called a k-path vertex cover if every path of order k in G contains at least one vertex from S. Denote by \psi_k(G) the minimum cardinality of a k-path vertex cover in G. It is shown that the problem…
The string indexing problem is a fundamental computational problem with numerous applications, including information retrieval and bioinformatics. It aims to efficiently solve the pattern matching problem: given a text T of length n for…
The central problem in sequence reconstruction is to find the minimum number of distinct channel outputs required to uniquely reconstruct the transmitted sequence. According to Levenshtein's work in 2001, this number is determined by the…
In the k-2VC problem, we are given an undirected graph G with edge costs and an integer k; the goal is to find a minimum-cost 2-vertex-connected subgraph of G containing at least k vertices. A slightly more general version is obtained if…