Related papers: The 2-Attractor Problem is NP-Complete
We study the computational complexity of graph planarization via edge contraction. The problem CONTRACT asks whether there exists a set $S$ of at most $k$ edges that when contracted produces a planar graph. We work with a more general…
In this paper we investigate the colorful components framework, motivated by applications emerging from comparative genomics. The general goal is to remove a collection of edges from an undirected vertex-colored graph $G$ such that in the…
We consider the weighted $k$-set packing problem, in which we are given a collection of weighted sets, each with at most $k$ elements and must return a collection of pairwise disjoint sets with maximum total weight. For $k = 3$, this…
An edge-coloured cycle is $rainbow$ if all edges of the cycle have distinct colours. For $k\geq 1$, let $\mathcal{F}_{k}$ denote the family of all graphs with the property that any $k$ vertices lie on a cycle. For $G\in \mathcal{F}_{k}$, a…
A squarefree word is a sequence $w$ of symbols such that there are no strings $x, y$, and $z$ for which $w=xyyz$. A nonrepetitive coloring of a graph is an edge coloring in which the sequence of colors along any open path is squarefree. We…
In this paper we show that the following problem is NP-complete: Given an alphabet $\Sigma$ and two strings over $\Sigma$, the question is whether there exists a permutation of $\Sigma$ which is a subsequence of both of the given strings.
In this work, we prove the NP-completeness of two variants of tokenisation, defined as the problem of compressing a dataset to at most $\delta$ symbols by either finding a vocabulary directly (direct tokenisation), or selecting a sequence…
State minimization of combinatorial filters is a fundamental problem that arises, for example, in building cheap, resource-efficient robots. But exact minimization is known to be NP-hard. This paper conducts a more nuanced analysis of this…
Burke and Teng introduced a two-player combinatorial game Atropos based on Sperner's lemma, and showed that deciding whether one has a winning strategy for Atropos is PSPACE-complete. In the original Atropos game, the players must color a…
A k-transmitter in a simple orthogonal polygon P is a mobile guard that travels back and forth along an orthogonal line segment s inside P. The k-transmitter can see a point p in P if there exists a point q on s such that the line segment…
Color-constrained subgraph problems are those where we are given an edge-colored (directed or undirected) graph and the task is to find a specific type of subgraph, like a spanning tree, an arborescence, a single-source shortest path tree,…
The contention resolution framework is a versatile rounding technique used as a part of the relaxation and rounding approach for solving constrained submodular function maximization problems. We apply this framework to the hypergraph…
We study two variants of the shortest path problem. Given an integer k, the k-color-constrained and the k-interchange-constrained shortest path problems, respectively seek a shortest path that uses no more than k colors and one that makes…
The K-way vertex cut problem} consists in, given a graph G, finding a subset of vertices of a given size, whose removal partitions G into the maximum number of connected components. This problem has many applications in several areas. It…
For a graph invariant $\pi$, the Contraction($\pi$) problem consists in, given a graph $G$ and two positive integers $k,d$, deciding whether one can contract at most $k$ edges of $G$ to obtain a graph in which $\pi$ has dropped by at least…
We prove the NP-completeness of the following problem. Given a set $S$ of $n$ slopes and an integer $k\geq 1$, is it possible to draw a complete graph on $k$ vertices in the plane using only slopes from $S$? Equivalently, does there exist a…
We study the time complexity of the discrete $k$-center problem and related (exact) geometric set cover problems when $k$ or the size of the cover is small. We obtain a plethora of new results: - We give the first subquadratic algorithm for…
Consider an input text string T[1,N] drawn from an unbounded alphabet. We study partial computation in suffix-based problems for Data Compression and Text Indexing such as (I) retrieve any segment of K<=N consecutive symbols from the…
We present a 6-approximation algorithm for the minimum-cost $k$-node connected spanning subgraph problem, assuming that the number of nodes is at least $k^3(k-1)+k$. We apply a combinatorial preprocessing, based on the Frank-Tardos…
Indexing a set of strings for prefix search or membership queries is a fundamental task with many applications such as information retrieval or database systems. A classic abstract data type for modelling such an index is a trie. Due to the…