Related papers: On the complexity of the Whitehead minimization pr…
A factor $u$ of a word $w$ is a cover of $w$ if every position in $w$ lies within some occurrence of $u$ in $w$. A word $w$ covered by $u$ thus generalizes the idea of a repetition, that is, a word composed of exact concatenations of $u$.…
We give a simple algorithm to solve the subgroup membership problem for virtually free groups. For a fixed virtually free group with a fixed generating set $X$, the subgroup membership problem is uniformly solvable in time $O(n\log^*(n))$…
Polynomial reduction is one of the main tools in computational algebra with innumerable applications in many areas, both pure and applied. Since many years both the theory and an efficient design of the related algorithm have been solidly…
Braid combing is a procedure defined by Emil Artin to solve the word problem in braid groups for the first time. It is well-known to have exponential complexity. In this paper, we use the theory of straight line programs to give a…
Many complex questions in biology, physics, and mathematics can be mapped to the graph isomorphism problem and the closely related graph automorphism problem. In particular, these problems appear in the context of network visualization,…
The NP-hard maximum value preordering problem is both a joint relaxation and a hybrid of the clique partition problem (a clustering problem) and the partial ordering problem. Toward approximate solutions and lower bounds, we introduce a…
The main result of the paper is motivated by the following two, apparently unrelated graph optimization problems: (A) as an extension of Edmonds' disjoint branchings theorem, characterize digraphs comprising $k$ disjoint branchings $B_i$…
An algorithm for the explicit computation of a complete set of primitive central idempotents, Wedderburn decomposition and the automorphism group of the semisimple group algebra of a finite metabelian group is developed. The algorithm is…
J.H.C. Whitehead's second free-group algorithm determines whether or not two given elements of a free group lie in the same orbit of the automorphism group of the free group. The algorithm involves certain connected graphs, and Whitehead…
We investigate Whitehead's asphericity question from a new perspective, using results and techniques of the homotopy theory of finite topological spaces. We also introduce a method of reduction to investigate asphericity based on the…
Budget Minimization is a scheduling problem with precedence constraints, i.e., a scheduling problem on a partially ordered set of jobs $(N, \unlhd)$. A job $j \in N$ is available for scheduling, if all jobs $i \in N$ with $i \unlhd j$ are…
We consider a large family of problems in which an ordering (or, more precisely, a chain of subsets) of a finite set must be chosen to minimize some weighted sum of costs. This family includes variations of Min Sum Set Cover (MSSC), several…
Given a subset of states $S$ of a deterministic finite automaton and a word $w$, the preimage is the subset of all states mapped to a state in $S$ by the action of $w$. We study three natural problems concerning words giving certain…
We study the following rearrangement problem: Given $n$ words, rearrange and concatenate them so that the obtained string is lexicographically smallest (or largest, respectively). We show that this problem reduces to sorting the given words…
Given a weighted, ordered query set $Q$ and a partition of $Q$ into classes, we study the problem of computing a minimum-cost decision tree that, given any query $q$ in $Q$, uses equality tests and less-than comparisons to determine the…
A finitary automaton group is a group generated by an invertible, deterministic finite-state letter-to-letter transducer whose only cycles are self-loops at an identity state. We show that, for this presentation of finite groups, the…
A longstanding question of Gromov asks whether every one-ended word-hyperbolic group contains a subgroup isomorphic to the fundamental group of a closed hyperbolic surface. An infinite family of word-hyperbolic groups can be obtained by…
We give a ranker-based description using finite-index congruences for the variety $\boldsymbol{\mathrm{DAb}}$ of finite monoids whose regular $\mathcal{D}$-classes form Abelian groups. This combinatorial description yields a normal form for…
We show that the Word Problem in finitely generated subgroups of $\textsf{GL}_d(\mathbb{Z})$ can be solved in linear average-case complexity. This is done under the bit-complexity model, which accounts for the fact that large integers are…
Fixing an arbitrary set $\mathcal{F}$ of complex-valued functions over Boolean variables yields a counting problem $\#\mathcal{F}$. Taking only functions from $\mathcal{F}$ to form a tensor network as the problem's input, the counting…