相关论文: The unbearable hardness of unknotting

We prove that certain problems naturally arising in knot theory are NP--hard or NP--complete. These are the problems of obtaining one diagram from another one of a link in a bounded number of Reidemeister moves, determining whether a link…

We show that three natural decision problems about links and 3-manifolds are computationally hard, assuming some conjectures in complexity theory. The first problem is determining whether a link in the 3-sphere bounds a Seifert surface with…

We consider the problem of deciding whether a polygonal knot in 3-dimensional Euclidean space is unknotted, capable of being continuously deformed without self-intersection so that it lies in a plane. We show that this problem, {\sc…

We present three "hard" diagrams of the unknot. They require (at least) three extra crossings before they can be simplified to the trivial unknot diagram via Reidemeister moves in $\mathbb{S}^2$. Both examples are constructed by applying…

Using unknotting number, we introduce a link diagram invariant of Hass and Nowik type, which changes at most by 2 under a Reidemeister move. As an application, we show that a certain infinite sequence of diagrams of the trivial…

In this study of the Reidemeister moves within the classical knot theory, we focus on hard diagrams of knots and links, categorizing them as either rigid or shaky based on their adaptability to certain moves. We establish that every link…

We give a new, elementary proof of what we believe is the simplest known example of a ``natural'' problem in computational 3-dimensional topology that is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard -- namely, the \emph{Trivial Sublink Problem}: given a diagram $L$…

We prove that any diagram of the unknot with c crossings may be reduced to the trivial diagram using at most (236 c)^{11} Reidemeister moves. Moreover, every diagram in this sequence has at most (7 c)^2 crossings. We also prove a similar…

For each link type $K$ in the 3-sphere, we show that there is a polynomial $p_K$ such that any two diagrams of $K$ with $c_1$ and $c_2$ crossings differ by at most $p_K(c_1) + p_K(c_2)$ Reidemeister moves. As a consequence, the problem of…

Deciding whether a diagram of a knot can be untangled with a given number of moves (as a part of the input) is known to be NP-complete. In this paper we determine the parameterized complexity of this problem with respect to a natural…

We develop a reinforcement learning pipeline for simplifying knot diagrams. A trained agent learns move proposals and a value heuristic for navigating Reidemeister moves. The pipeline applies to arbitrary knots and links; we test it on…

A knot is an an embedding of a circle into three-dimensional space. We say that a knot is unknotted if there is an ambient isotopy of the embedding to a standard circle. By representing knots via planar diagrams, we discuss the problem of…

This paper gives infinitely many examples of unknot diagrams that are hard, in the sense that the diagrams need to be made more complicated by Reidemeister moves before they can be simplified. In order to construct these diagrams, we prove…

The unknotting number is the classical invariant of a knot. However, its determination is difficult in general. To obtain the unknotting number from definition one has to investigate all possible diagrams of the knot. We tried to show the…

In mathematics, a knot is a single strand of string crossed over itself any number of times, and connected at the ends. The Reidemeister Moves have been proven to be the three core moves necessary to fully untangle a knot. Some knots can be…

We prove that the problem of deciding whether a 2- or 3-dimensional simplicial complex embeds into $\mathbb{R}^3$ is NP-hard. Our construction also shows that deciding whether a 3-manifold with boundary tori admits an $\mathbb{S}^{3}$…

In the previous paper, we considered a link diagram invariant of Hass and Nowik type using regular smoothing and unknotting number, to estimate the number of Reidemeister moves needed for unlinking. In this paper, we introduce a new link…

We show that the problem of determining whether a knot in the 3-sphere is non-trivial lies in NP. This is a consequence of the following more general result. The problem of determining whether the Thurston norm of a second homology class in…

Given a tame knot K presented in the form of a knot diagram, we show that the problem of determining whether K is knotted is in the complexity class NP, assuming the generalized Riemann hypothesis (GRH). In other words, there exists a…

We present a sequence of diagrams of the unknot for which the minimum number of Reidemeister moves required to pass to the trivial diagram is quadratic with respect to the number of crossings. These bounds apply both in $S^2$ and in $\R^2$.