08431 Abstracts Collection -- Moderately Exponential Time Algorithms

From $19/10/2008$ to $24/10/2008$, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08431 ``Moderately Exponential Time Algorithms \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Tight Lower Bounds for List Edge Coloring

The fastest algorithms for edge coloring run in time 2^m n^{O(1)}, where m and n are the number of edges and vertices of the input graph, respectively. For dense graphs, this bound becomes 2^{Theta(n^2)}. This is a somewhat unique situation, since most of the studied graph problems admit algorithms running in time 2^{O(n log n)}. It is a notorious open problem to either show an algorithm for edge coloring running in time 2^{o(n^2)} or to refute it, assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) or other well established assumptions. We notice that the same question can be asked for list edge coloring, a well-studied generalization of edge coloring where every edge comes with a set (often called a list) of allowed colors. Our main result states that list edge coloring for simple graphs does not admit an algorithm running in time 2^{o(n^2)}, unless ETH fails. Interestingly, the algorithm for edge coloring running in time 2^m n^{O(1)} generalizes to the list version without any asymptotic slow-down. Thus, our lower bound is essentially tight. This also means that in order to design an algorithm running in time 2^{o(n^2)} for edge coloring, one has to exploit its special features compared to the list version

Narrow sieves for parameterized paths and packings

We present randomized algorithms for some well-studied, hard combinatorial problems: the k-path problem, the p-packing of q-sets problem, and the q-dimensional p-matching problem. Our algorithms solve these problems with high probability in time exponential only in the parameter (k, p, q) and using polynomial space; the constant bases of the exponentials are significantly smaller than in previous works. For example, for the k-path problem the improvement is from 2 to 1.66. We also show how to detect if a d-regular graph admits an edge coloring with $d$ colors in time within a polynomial factor of O(2^{(d-1)n/2}). Our techniques build upon and generalize some recently published ideas by I. Koutis (ICALP 2009), R. Williams (IPL 2009), and A. Bj\"orklund (STACS 2010, FOCS 2010)

Dagstuhl News January - December 2008

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic