7 research outputs found
Hamiltonian cycles and subsets of discounted occupational measures
We study a certain polytope arising from embedding the Hamiltonian cycle
problem in a discounted Markov decision process. The Hamiltonian cycle problem
can be reduced to finding particular extreme points of a certain polytope
associated with the input graph. This polytope is a subset of the space of
discounted occupational measures. We characterize the feasible bases of the
polytope for a general input graph , and determine the expected numbers of
different types of feasible bases when the underlying graph is random. We
utilize these results to demonstrate that augmenting certain additional
constraints to reduce the polyhedral domain can eliminate a large number of
feasible bases that do not correspond to Hamiltonian cycles. Finally, we
develop a random walk algorithm on the feasible bases of the reduced polytope
and present some numerical results. We conclude with a conjecture on the
feasible bases of the reduced polytope.Comment: revised based on referees comment