Long Alternating Paths Exist

p_? of ? points from P so that (i) all points are pairwise distinct; (ii) any two consecutive points p_i, p_{i+1} have different colors; and (iii) any two segments p_i p_{i+1} and p_j p_{j+1} have disjoint relative interiors, for i ? j. We show that there is an absolute constant ? > 0, independent of n and of the coloring, such that P always admits a non-crossing alternating path of length at least (1 + ?)n. The result is obtained through a slightly stronger statement: there always exists a non-crossing bichromatic separated matching on at least (1 + ?)n points of P. This is a properly colored matching whose segments are pairwise disjoint and intersected by common line. For both versions, this is the first improvement of the easily obtained lower bound of n by an additive term linear in n. The best known published upper bounds are asymptotically of order 4n/3+o(n)

Upper and Lower Bounds on Long Dual-Paths in Line Arrangements

Given a line arrangement $\cal A$ with $n$ lines, we show that there exists a path of length $n^2/3 - O(n)$ in the dual graph of $\cal A$ formed by its faces. This bound is tight up to lower order terms. For the bicolored version, we describe an example of a line arrangement with $3k$ blue and $2k$ red lines with no alternating path longer than $14k$. Further, we show that any line arrangement with $n$ lines has a coloring such that it has an alternating path of length $\Omega (n^2/ \log n)$. Our results also hold for pseudoline arrangements.Comment: 19 page

Time and Parallelizability Results for Parity Games with Bounded Tree and DAG Width

Parity games are a much researched class of games in NP intersect CoNP that are not known to be in P. Consequently, researchers have considered specialised algorithms for the case where certain graph parameters are small. In this paper, we study parity games on graphs with bounded treewidth, and graphs with bounded DAG width. We show that parity games with bounded DAG width can be solved in O(n^(k+3) k^(k + 2) (d + 1)^(3k + 2)) time, where n, k, and d are the size, treewidth, and number of priorities in the parity game. This is an improvement over the previous best algorithm, given by Berwanger et al., which runs in n^O(k^2) time. We also show that, if a tree decomposition is provided, then parity games with bounded treewidth can be solved in O(n k^(k + 5) (d + 1)^(3k + 5)) time. This improves over previous best algorithm, given by Obdrzalek, which runs in O(n d^(2(k+1)^2)) time. Our techniques can also be adapted to show that the problem of solving parity games with bounded treewidth lies in the complexity class NC^2, which is the class of problems that can be efficiently parallelized. This is in stark contrast to the general parity game problem, which is known to be P-hard, and thus unlikely to be contained in NC

Long properly colored cycles in edge colored complete graphs

Let $K_{n}^{c}$ denote a complete graph on $n$ vertices whose edges are colored in an arbitrary way. Let $\Delta^{\mathrm{mon}} (K_{n}^{c})$ denote the maximum number of edges of the same color incident with a vertex of $K_{n}^{c}$. A properly colored cycle (path) in $K_{n}^{c}$ is a cycle (path) in which adjacent edges have distinct colors. B. Bollob\'{a}s and P. Erd\"{o}s (1976) proposed the following conjecture: if $\Delta^{\mathrm{mon}} (K_{n}^{c})<\lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor$, then $K_{n}^{c}$ contains a properly colored Hamiltonian cycle. Li, Wang and Zhou proved that if $\Delta^{\mathrm{mon}} (K_{n}^{c})< \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor$, then $K_{n}^{c}$ contains a properly colored cycle of length at least $\lceil \frac{n+2}{3}\rceil+1$. In this paper, we improve the bound to $\lceil \frac{n}{2}\rceil + 2$.Comment: 8 page