526 research outputs found
Decomposing tournaments into paths
We consider a generalisation of Kelly's conjecture which is due to Alspach, Mason, and Pullman from 1976. Kelly's conjecture states that every regular tournament has an edge decomposition into Hamilton cycles, and this was proved by Kühn and Osthus for large tournaments. The conjecture of Alspach, Mason, and Pullman asks for the minimum number of paths needed in a path decomposition of a general tournament T . There is a natural lower bound for this number in terms of the degree sequence of T and it is conjectured that this bound is correct for tournaments of even order. Almost all cases of the conjecture are open and we prove many of them
Decomposing tournaments into paths
In this work we consider a generalisation of Kelly's conjecture which is due Alspach, Mason, and Pullman from 1976. Kelly's conjecture states that every regular tournament has an edge decomposition into Hamilton cycles, and this was proved by Kühn and Osthus for large tournaments. The conjecture of Alspach, Mason, and Pullman concerns general tournaments and asks for the minimum number of paths needed in an edge decomposition of each tournament into paths. There is a natural lower bound for this number in terms of the degree sequence of the tournament and they conjecture this bound is correct for tournaments of even order. Almost all cases of the conjecture are open and we prove many of them
Hamilton decompositions of regular tournaments
We show that every sufficiently large regular tournament can almost
completely be decomposed into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. More precisely,
for each \eta>0 every regular tournament G of sufficiently large order n
contains at least (1/2-\eta)n edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. This gives an
approximate solution to a conjecture of Kelly from 1968. Our result also
extends to almost regular tournaments.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures. Added section sketching how we can extend our
main result. To appear in the Proceedings of the LM
Arc-Disjoint Paths and Trees in 2-Regular Digraphs
An out-(in-)branching B_s^+ (B_s^-) rooted at s in a digraph D is a connected
spanning subdigraph of D in which every vertex x != s has precisely one arc
entering (leaving) it and s has no arcs entering (leaving) it. We settle the
complexity of the following two problems:
1) Given a 2-regular digraph , decide if it contains two arc-disjoint
branchings B^+_u, B^-_v.
2) Given a 2-regular digraph D, decide if it contains an out-branching B^+_u
such that D remains connected after removing the arcs of B^+_u.
Both problems are NP-complete for general digraphs. We prove that the first
problem remains NP-complete for 2-regular digraphs, whereas the second problem
turns out to be polynomial when we do not prescribe the root in advance. We
also prove that, for 2-regular digraphs, the latter problem is in fact
equivalent to deciding if contains two arc-disjoint out-branchings. We
generalize this result to k-regular digraphs where we want to find a number of
pairwise arc-disjoint spanning trees and out-branchings such that there are k
in total, again without prescribing any roots.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
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On the homotopy type of multipath complexes
A multipath in a directed graph is a disjoint union of paths. The multipath complex of a directed graph G is the simplicial complex whose faces are the multipaths of G. We compute Euler characteristics, and associated generating functions, of the multipath complexes of directed graphs from certain families, including transitive tournaments and complete bipartite graphs. We show that if G is a linear graph, polygon, small grid or transitive tournament, then the homotopy type of the multipath complex of G is always contractible or a wedge of spheres. We introduce a new technique for decomposing directed graphs into dynamical regions, which allows us to simplify the homotopy computations
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