Counting and Sampling: Algorithms and Complexity (Dagstuhl Seminar 22482)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 22482 "Counting and Sampling: Algorithms and Complexity". We document the talks presented, covering many advances in the area made over the last five years. As well, we document the progress made by working groups on future projects

The Sum of Squares in Polycubes (Media Exposition)

We give several ways to derive and express classic summation problems in terms of polycubes. We visualize them with 3D printed models. The video is here: http://go.ncsu.edu/sum_of_squares

On the Geometric Thickness of 2-Degenerate Graphs

A graph is 2-degenerate if every subgraph contains a vertex of degree at most 2. We show that every 2-degenerate graph can be drawn with straight lines such that the drawing decomposes into 4 plane forests. Therefore, the geometric arboricity, and hence the geometric thickness, of 2-degenerate graphs is at most 4. On the other hand, we show that there are 2-degenerate graphs that do not admit any straight-line drawing with a decomposition of the edge set into 2 plane graphs. That is, there are 2-degenerate graphs with geometric thickness, and hence geometric arboricity, at least 3. This answers two questions posed by Eppstein [Separating thickness from geometric thickness. In Towards a Theory of Geometric Graphs, vol. 342 of Contemp. Math., AMS, 2004]

Termination of Term Rewriting: Foundation, Formalization, Implementation, and Competition (Invited Talk)

Automated termination analysis is a central topic in the research of term rewriting. In this talk, I will first review the theoretical foundation of termination of term rewriting, leading to the recently established tuple interpretation method. Then I will present an Isabelle/HOL formalization of the theory. Although the formalization is based on the existing library IsaFoR (Isabelle Formalization of Rewriting), the present work takes another approach of representing relations (predicates rather than sets) so that the notation is more human friendly. Then I will present a unified implementation of the termination analysis techniques via SMT encoding, leading to the termination prover NaTT. Many tools have been developed for termination analysis and have been competing annually in termCOMP (Termination Competition) for two decades. At the end of the talk, I will share my experience in organizing termCOMP in the last five years

Approximation Algorithms for the Longest Run Subsequence Problem

We study the approximability of the Longest Run Subsequence problem (LRS for short). For a string S = s_1 ? s_n over an alphabet ?, a run of a symbol ? ? ? in S is a maximal substring of consecutive occurrences of ?. A run subsequence S\u27 of S is a sequence in which every symbol ? ? ? occurs in at most one run. Given a string S, the goal of LRS is to find a longest run subsequence S^* of S such that the length |S^*| is maximized over all the run subsequences of S. It is known that LRS is APX-hard even if each symbol has at most two occurrences in the input string, and that LRS admits a polynomial-time k-approximation algorithm if the number of occurrences of every symbol in the input string is bounded by k. In this paper, we design a polynomial-time (k+1)/2-approximation algorithm for LRS under the k-occurrence constraint on input strings. For the case k = 2, we further improve the approximation ratio from 3/2 to 4/3

Optimal Multiprocessor Locking Protocols Under FIFO Scheduling

Real-time locking protocols are typically designed to reduce any priority-inversion blocking (pi-blocking) a task may incur while waiting to access a shared resource. For the multiprocessor case, a number of such protocols have been developed that ensure asymptotically optimal pi-blocking bounds under job-level fixed-priority scheduling. Unfortunately, no optimal multiprocessor real-time locking protocols are known that ensure tight pi-blocking bounds under any scheduler. This paper presents the first such protocols. Specifically, protocols are presented for mutual exclusion, reader-writer synchronization, and k-exclusion that are optimal under first-in-first-out (FIFO) scheduling when schedulability analysis treats suspension times as computation. Experiments are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of these protocols

Extending Orthogonal Planar Graph Drawings Is Fixed-Parameter Tractable

The task of finding an extension to a given partial drawing of a graph while adhering to constraints on the representation has been extensively studied in the literature, with well-known results providing efficient algorithms for fundamental representations such as planar and beyond-planar topological drawings. In this paper, we consider the extension problem for bend-minimal orthogonal drawings of planar graphs, which is among the most fundamental geometric graph drawing representations. While the problem was known to be NP-hard, it is natural to consider the case where only a small part of the graph is still to be drawn. Here, we establish the fixed-parameter tractability of the problem when parameterized by the size of the missing subgraph. Our algorithm is based on multiple novel ingredients which intertwine geometric and combinatorial arguments. These include the identification of a new graph representation of bend-equivalent regions for vertex placement in the plane, establishing a bound on the treewidth of this auxiliary graph, and a global point-grid that allows us to discretize the possible placement of bends and vertices into locally bounded subgrids for each of the above regions