31 research outputs found
Tropical polyhedra are equivalent to mean payoff games
We show that several decision problems originating from max-plus or tropical
convexity are equivalent to zero-sum two player game problems. In particular,
we set up an equivalence between the external representation of tropical convex
sets and zero-sum stochastic games, in which tropical polyhedra correspond to
deterministic games with finite action spaces. Then, we show that the winning
initial positions can be determined from the associated tropical polyhedron. We
obtain as a corollary a game theoretical proof of the fact that the tropical
rank of a matrix, defined as the maximal size of a submatrix for which the
optimal assignment problem has a unique solution, coincides with the maximal
number of rows (or columns) of the matrix which are linearly independent in the
tropical sense. Our proofs rely on techniques from non-linear Perron-Frobenius
theory.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures; v2: updated references, added background
materials and illustrations; v3: minor improvements, references update
Obstructions to Faster Diameter Computation: Asteroidal Sets
Full version of an IPEC'22 paperAn extremity is a vertex such that the removal of its closed neighbourhood does not increase the number of connected components. Let be the class of all connected graphs whose quotient graph obtained from modular decomposition contains no more than pairwise nonadjacent extremities. Our main contributions are as follows. First, we prove that the diameter of every -edge graph in can be computed in deterministic time. We then improve the runtime to linear for all graphs with bounded clique-number. Furthermore, we can compute an additive -approximation of all vertex eccentricities in deterministic time. This is in sharp contrast with general -edge graphs for which, under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), one cannot compute the diameter in time for any . As important special cases of our main result, we derive an -time algorithm for exact diameter computation within dominating pair graphs of diameter at least six, and an -time algorithm for this problem on graphs of asteroidal number at most . We end up presenting an improved algorithm for chordal graphs of bounded asteroidal number, and a partial extension of our results to the larger class of all graphs with a dominating target of bounded cardinality. Our time upper bounds in the paper are shown to be essentially optimal under plausible complexity assumptions