Related papers: The difficulty of beating the Taxman
The paper considers the NP-hard graph vertex coloring problem, which differs from traditional problems in which it is required to color vertices with a given (or minimal) number of colors so that adjacent vertices have different colors. In…
Graph matching---aligning a pair of graphs to minimize their edge disagreements---has received wide-spread attention from both theoretical and applied communities over the past several decades, including combinatorics, computer vision, and…
For some weighted $NP$-complete problems, checking whether a proposed solution is optimal is a non-trivial task. Such is the case for the celebrated traveling salesman problem, or the spin-glass problem in 3 dimensions. In this letter, we…
We introduce the Polychromatic Traveling Salesman Problem (PCTSP), where the input is an edge weighted graph whose vertices are partitioned into $k$ equal-sized color classes, and the goal is to find a minimum-length Hamiltonian cycle that…
An instance of Hamiltonian cycle problem can be solved by converting it to an instance of Travelling salesman problem, assigning any choice of weights to edges of the underlying graph. In this note we demonstrate that, for difficult…
In general, Nash equilibria in normal-form games may require players to play (probabilistically) mixed strategies. We define a measure of the complexity of finite probability distributions and study the complexity required to play Nash…
All Colors Shortest Path problem defined on an undirected graph aims at finding a shortest, possibly non-simple, path where every color occurs at least once, assuming that each vertex in the graph is associated with a color known in…
A new characterization of Hamiltonian graphs using f-cutset matrix is proposed. Based on this new characterization, a new exact polynomial time algorithm for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) is developed. We then define the so-called…
In this paper, we consider the maximum $k$-edge-colorable subgraph problem. In this problem we are given a graph $G$ and a positive integer $k$, the goal is to take $k$ matchings of $G$ such that their union contains maximum number of…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
We establish that the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) threshold problem for mean-payoff games is NP-complete. While the SPE threshold problem was recently shown to be decidable (in doubly exponential time) and NP-hard, its exact worst…
Can agents be trained to answer difficult mathematical questions by playing a game? We consider the integer feasibility problem, a challenge of deciding whether a system of linear equations and inequalities has a solution with integer…
In the popular computer game of Tetris, the player is given a sequence of tetromino pieces and must pack them into a rectangular gameboard initially occupied by a given configuration of filled squares; any completely filled row of the…
Many real-world optimization problems have multiple interacting components. Each of these can be NP-hard and they can be in conflict with each other, i.e., the optimal solution for one component does not necessarily represent an optimal…
In this paper, we study the prize-collecting rural postman problem (PCRPP), a variant of the rural postman problem. Given a PCRPP instance consisting of an undirected graph whose edges have nonnegative lengths and nonnegative profits,…
We show that, by using multiplicative weights in a game-theoretic thought experiment (and an important convexity result on the composition of multiplicative weights with the relative entropy function), a symmetric bimatrix game (that is, a…
The framework outlined in [arXiv:2010.13024] provides an approximation algorithm for computing Nash equilibria of normal form games. Since NASH is a well-known PPAD-complete problem, this framework has potential applications to other $PPAD$…
We initiate the theoretical study of Ext-TSP, a problem that originates in the area of profile-guided binary optimization. Given a graph $G=(V, E)$ with positive edge weights $w: E \rightarrow R^+$, and a non-increasing discount function…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player games with a reachability objective. The basic question asks whether one player can ensure reaching a given target with at least a given probability. A natural extension is games with a…
Suppose we are given a bipartite graph that admits a perfect matching and an adversary may delete any edge from the graph with the intention of destroying all perfect matchings. We consider the task of adding a minimum cost edge-set to the…