Related papers: NP-Hardness and a PTAS for the Pinwheel Problem
Many practical problems in almost all scientific and technological disciplines have been classified as computationally hard (NP-hard or even NP-complete). In life sciences, combinatorial optimization problems frequently arise in molecular…
The Balanced Connected Subgraph problem (BCS) was recently introduced by Bhore et al. (CALDAM 2019). In this problem, we are given a graph $G$ whose vertices are colored by red or blue. The goal is to find a maximum connected subgraph of…
In an article [3] published recently in this journal, it was shown that when k >= 3, the problem of deciding whether the distinguishing chromatic number of a graph is at most k is NP-hard. We consider the problem when k = 2. In regards to…
We show that approximating the trace norm contraction coefficient of a quantum channel within a constant factor is NP-hard. Equivalently, this shows that determining the optimal success probability for encoding a bit in a quantum system…
We consider the robustness of computational hardness of problems whose input is obtained by applying independent random deletions to worst-case instances. For some classical $NP$-hard problems on graphs, such as Coloring, Vertex-Cover, and…
We point out the connection between mathematical knot theory and spin glass/search problem. In particular, we present a statistical mechanical formulation of the problem of computing a knot invariant; p-colorability problem, which provides…
What makes a computational problem easy (e.g., in P, that is, solvable in polynomial time) or hard (e.g., NP-hard)? This fundamental question now has a satisfactory answer for a quite broad class of computational problems, so called…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ red and blue points in the plane, a \emph{planar bichromatic spanning tree} of $P$ is a spanning tree of $P$, such that each edge connects between a red and a blue point, and no two edges intersect. In the bottleneck…
Let $C_1,\dots,C_{d+1}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ be $d+1$ point sets, each containing the origin in its convex hull. We call these sets color classes, and we call a sequence $p_1, \dots, p_{d+1}$ with $p_i \in C_i$, for $i = 1, \dots, d+1$, a…
We consider the SUBSET SUM problem and its important variants in this paper. In the SUBSET SUM problem, a (multi-)set $X$ of $n$ positive numbers and a target number $t$ are given, and the task is to find a subset of $X$ with the maximal…
In this article we study a broad class of integer programming problems in variable dimension. We show that these so-termed {\em n-fold integer programming problems} are polynomial time solvable. Our proof involves two heavy ingredients…
In this article, we study the problem of finding the longest common separable pattern between several permutations. We give a polynomial-time algorithm when the number of input permutations is fixed and show that the problem is NP-hard for…
We address the classical knapsack problem and a variant in which an upper bound is imposed on the number of items that can be selected. We show that appropriate combinations of rounding techniques yield novel and powerful ways of rounding.…
For a fixed property (graph class) ${\Pi}$, given a graph G and an integer k, the ${\Pi}$-deletion problem consists in deciding if we can turn $G$ into a graph with the property ${\Pi}$ by deleting at most $k$ edges. The ${\Pi}$-deletion…
For graph classes $P_1,...,P_k$, Generalized Graph Coloring is the problem of deciding whether the vertex set of a given graph $G$ can be partitioned into subsets $V_1,...,V_k$ so that $V_j$ induces a graph in the class $P_j$…
We convert, within polynomial-time and sequential processing, NP-Complete Problems into a problem of deciding feasibility of a given system S of linear equations with constants and coefficients of binary-variables that are 0, 1, or -1. S is…
Given two points s and t in the plane and a set of obstacles defined by closed curves, what is the minimum number of obstacles touched by a path connecting s and t? This is a fundamental and well-studied problem arising naturally in…
Given a linear system, we consider the problem of finding a small set of variables to affect with an input so that the resulting system is controllable. We show that this problem is NP-hard; indeed, we show that even approximating the…
We study the complexity of the decision problem known as Permutation Pattern Matching, or PPM. The input of PPM consists of a pair of permutations $\tau$ (the `text') and $\pi$ (the `pattern'), and the goal is to decide whether $\tau$…
In this paper, we consider different constrained partition problems for weighted trees and cactus graphs. We focus on the (l,u)-partition problem, which is the problem of partitioning a weighted graph into connected clusters such that each…