13,445 research outputs found
Search for the end of a path in the d-dimensional grid and in other graphs
We consider the worst-case query complexity of some variants of certain
\cl{PPAD}-complete search problems. Suppose we are given a graph and a
vertex . We denote the directed graph obtained from by
directing all edges in both directions by . is a directed subgraph of
which is unknown to us, except that it consists of vertex-disjoint
directed paths and cycles and one of the paths originates in . Our goal is
to find an endvertex of a path by using as few queries as possible. A query
specifies a vertex , and the answer is the set of the edges of
incident to , together with their directions. We also show lower bounds for
the special case when consists of a single path. Our proofs use the theory
of graph separators. Finally, we consider the case when the graph is a grid
graph. In this case, using the connection with separators, we give
asymptotically tight bounds as a function of the size of the grid, if the
dimension of the grid is considered as fixed. In order to do this, we prove a
separator theorem about grid graphs, which is interesting on its own right
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