219 research outputs found
Hamilton cycles in graphs and hypergraphs: an extremal perspective
As one of the most fundamental and well-known NP-complete problems, the
Hamilton cycle problem has been the subject of intensive research. Recent
developments in the area have highlighted the crucial role played by the
notions of expansion and quasi-randomness. These concepts and other recent
techniques have led to the solution of several long-standing problems in the
area. New aspects have also emerged, such as resilience, robustness and the
study of Hamilton cycles in hypergraphs. We survey these developments and
highlight open problems, with an emphasis on extremal and probabilistic
approaches.Comment: to appear in the Proceedings of the ICM 2014; due to given page
limits, this final version is slightly shorter than the previous arxiv
versio
Hamilton cycles in sparse robustly expanding digraphs
The notion of robust expansion has played a central role in the solution of
several conjectures involving the packing of Hamilton cycles in graphs and
directed graphs. These and other results usually rely on the fact that every
robustly expanding (di)graph with suitably large minimum degree contains a
Hamilton cycle. Previous proofs of this require Szemer\'edi's Regularity Lemma
and so this fact can only be applied to dense, sufficiently large robust
expanders. We give a proof that does not use the Regularity Lemma and, indeed,
we can apply our result to suitable sparse robustly expanding digraphs.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Electronic Journal of Combinatoric
Hamilton decompositions of regular expanders: applications
In a recent paper, we showed that every sufficiently large regular digraph G
on n vertices whose degree is linear in n and which is a robust outexpander has
a decomposition into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. The main consequence of
this theorem is that every regular tournament on n vertices can be decomposed
into (n-1)/2 edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles, whenever n is sufficiently large.
This verified a conjecture of Kelly from 1968. In this paper, we derive a
number of further consequences of our result on robust outexpanders, the main
ones are the following: (i) an undirected analogue of our result on robust
outexpanders; (ii) best possible bounds on the size of an optimal packing of
edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in a graph of minimum degree d for a large range
of values for d. (iii) a similar result for digraphs of given minimum
semidegree; (iv) an approximate version of a conjecture of Nash-Williams on
Hamilton decompositions of dense regular graphs; (v) the observation that dense
quasi-random graphs are robust outexpanders; (vi) a verification of the `very
dense' case of a conjecture of Frieze and Krivelevich on packing edge-disjoint
Hamilton cycles in random graphs; (vii) a proof of a conjecture of Erdos on the
size of an optimal packing of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in a random
tournament.Comment: final version, to appear in J. Combinatorial Theory
Oriented trees and paths in digraphs
Which conditions ensure that a digraph contains all oriented paths of some
given length, or even a all oriented trees of some given size, as a subgraph?
One possible condition could be that the host digraph is a tournament of a
certain order. In arbitrary digraphs and oriented graphs, conditions on the
chromatic number, on the edge density, on the minimum outdegree and on the
minimum semidegree have been proposed. In this survey, we review the known
results, and highlight some open questions in the area
Tight Localizations of Feedback Sets
The classical NP-hard feedback arc set problem (FASP) and feedback vertex set
problem (FVSP) ask for a minimum set of arcs or
vertices whose removal , makes a given multi-digraph acyclic, respectively. Though both
problems are known to be APX-hard, approximation algorithms or proofs of
inapproximability are unknown. We propose a new
-heuristic for the directed FASP. While a ratio of is known to be a lower bound for the APX-hardness, at least by
empirical validation we achieve an approximation of . The most
relevant applications, such as circuit testing, ask for solving the FASP on
large sparse graphs, which can be done efficiently within tight error bounds
due to our approach.Comment: manuscript submitted to AC
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