195 research outputs found
An update on the Hirsch conjecture
The Hirsch conjecture was posed in 1957 in a letter from Warren M. Hirsch to
George Dantzig. It states that the graph of a d-dimensional polytope with n
facets cannot have diameter greater than n - d.
Despite being one of the most fundamental, basic and old problems in polytope
theory, what we know is quite scarce. Most notably, no polynomial upper bound
is known for the diameters that are conjectured to be linear. In contrast, very
few polytopes are known where the bound is attained. This paper collects
known results and remarks both on the positive and on the negative side of the
conjecture. Some proofs are included, but only those that we hope are
accessible to a general mathematical audience without introducing too many
technicalities.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures. Many proofs have been taken out from version 2
and put into the appendix arXiv:0912.423
Practical Volume Estimation by a New Annealing Schedule for Cooling Convex Bodies
We study the problem of estimating the volume of convex polytopes, focusing
on H- and V-polytopes, as well as zonotopes. Although a lot of effort is
devoted to practical algorithms for H-polytopes there is no such method for the
latter two representations. We propose a new, practical algorithm for all
representations, which is faster than existing methods. It relies on
Hit-and-Run sampling, and combines a new simulated annealing method with the
Multiphase Monte Carlo (MMC) approach. Our method introduces the following key
features to make it adaptive: (a) It defines a sequence of convex bodies in MMC
by introducing a new annealing schedule, whose length is shorter than in
previous methods with high probability, and the need of computing an enclosing
and an inscribed ball is removed; (b) It exploits statistical properties in
rejection-sampling and proposes a better empirical convergence criterion for
specifying each step; (c) For zonotopes, it may use a sequence of convex bodies
for MMC different than balls, where the chosen body adapts to the input. We
offer an open-source, optimized C++ implementation, and analyze its performance
to show that it outperforms state-of-the-art software for H-polytopes by
Cousins-Vempala (2016) and Emiris-Fisikopoulos (2018), while it undertakes
volume computations that were intractable until now, as it is the first
polynomial-time, practical method for V-polytopes and zonotopes that scales to
high dimensions (currently 100). We further focus on zonotopes, and
characterize them by their order (number of generators over dimension), because
this largely determines sampling complexity. We analyze a related application,
where we evaluate methods of zonotope approximation in engineering.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, 3 table
Three Puzzles on Mathematics, Computation, and Games
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving
mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first
puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear
programming. The second puzzle is about errors made when votes are counted
during elections. The third puzzle is: are quantum computers possible?Comment: ICM 2018 plenary lecture, Rio de Janeiro, 36 pages, 7 Figure
Graphs of Transportation Polytopes
This paper discusses properties of the graphs of 2-way and 3-way
transportation polytopes, in particular, their possible numbers of vertices and
their diameters. Our main results include a quadratic bound on the diameter of
axial 3-way transportation polytopes and a catalogue of non-degenerate
transportation polytopes of small sizes. The catalogue disproves five
conjectures about these polyhedra stated in the monograph by Yemelichev et al.
(1984). It also allowed us to discover some new results. For example, we prove
that the number of vertices of an transportation polytope is a
multiple of the greatest common divisor of and .Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures. Final version. Improvements to the exposition of
several lemmas and the upper bound in Theorem 1.1 is improved by a factor of
tw
Level Eulerian Posets
The notion of level posets is introduced. This class of infinite posets has
the property that between every two adjacent ranks the same bipartite graph
occurs. When the adjacency matrix is indecomposable, we determine the length of
the longest interval one needs to check to verify Eulerianness. Furthermore, we
show that every level Eulerian poset associated to an indecomposable matrix has
even order. A condition for verifying shellability is introduced and is
automated using the algebra of walks. Applying the Skolem--Mahler--Lech
theorem, the -series of a level poset is shown to be a rational
generating function in the non-commutative variables and .
In the case the poset is also Eulerian, the analogous result holds for the
-series. Using coalgebraic techniques a method is developed to
recognize the -series matrix of a level Eulerian poset
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