3,079 research outputs found
A Landscape Analysis of Constraint Satisfaction Problems
We discuss an analysis of Constraint Satisfaction problems, such as Sphere
Packing, K-SAT and Graph Coloring, in terms of an effective energy landscape.
Several intriguing geometrical properties of the solution space become in this
light familiar in terms of the well-studied ones of rugged (glassy) energy
landscapes. A `benchmark' algorithm naturally suggested by this construction
finds solutions in polynomial time up to a point beyond the `clustering' and in
some cases even the `thermodynamic' transitions. This point has a simple
geometric meaning and can be in principle determined with standard Statistical
Mechanical methods, thus pushing the analytic bound up to which problems are
guaranteed to be easy. We illustrate this for the graph three and four-coloring
problem. For Packing problems the present discussion allows to better
characterize the `J-point', proposed as a systematic definition of Random Close
Packing, and to place it in the context of other theories of glasses.Comment: 17 pages, 69 citations, 12 figure
A Coloring Algorithm for Disambiguating Graph and Map Drawings
Drawings of non-planar graphs always result in edge crossings. When there are
many edges crossing at small angles, it is often difficult to follow these
edges, because of the multiple visual paths resulted from the crossings that
slow down eye movements. In this paper we propose an algorithm that
disambiguates the edges with automatic selection of distinctive colors. Our
proposed algorithm computes a near optimal color assignment of a dual collision
graph, using a novel branch-and-bound procedure applied to a space
decomposition of the color gamut. We give examples demonstrating the
effectiveness of this approach in clarifying drawings of real world graphs and
maps
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