582 research outputs found
The Connectivity of Boolean Satisfiability: Dichotomies for Formulas and Circuits
For Boolean satisfiability problems, the structure of the solution space is
characterized by the solution graph, where the vertices are the solutions, and
two solutions are connected iff they differ in exactly one variable. In 2006,
Gopalan et al. studied connectivity properties of the solution graph and
related complexity issues for CSPs, motivated mainly by research on
satisfiability algorithms and the satisfiability threshold. They proved
dichotomies for the diameter of connected components and for the complexity of
the st-connectivity question, and conjectured a trichotomy for the connectivity
question. Recently, we were able to establish the trichotomy [arXiv:1312.4524].
Here, we consider connectivity issues of satisfiability problems defined by
Boolean circuits and propositional formulas that use gates, resp. connectives,
from a fixed set of Boolean functions. We obtain dichotomies for the diameter
and the two connectivity problems: on one side, the diameter is linear in the
number of variables, and both problems are in P, while on the other side, the
diameter can be exponential, and the problems are PSPACE-complete. For
partially quantified formulas, we show an analogous dichotomy.Comment: 20 pages, several improvement
The Complexity of Change
Many combinatorial problems can be formulated as "Can I transform
configuration 1 into configuration 2, if certain transformations only are
allowed?". An example of such a question is: given two k-colourings of a graph,
can I transform the first k-colouring into the second one, by recolouring one
vertex at a time, and always maintaining a proper k-colouring? Another example
is: given two solutions of a SAT-instance, can I transform the first solution
into the second one, by changing the truth value one variable at a time, and
always maintaining a solution of the SAT-instance? Other examples can be found
in many classical puzzles, such as the 15-Puzzle and Rubik's Cube.
In this survey we shall give an overview of some older and more recent work
on this type of problem. The emphasis will be on the computational complexity
of the problems: how hard is it to decide if a certain transformation is
possible or not?Comment: 28 pages, 6 figure
Shortest Reconfiguration of Colorings Under Kempe Changes
International audienc
Shortest Reconfiguration of Sliding Tokens on a Caterpillar
Suppose that we are given two independent sets I_b and I_r of a graph such
that |I_b|=|I_r|, and imagine that a token is placed on each vertex in |I_b|.
Then, the sliding token problem is to determine whether there exists a sequence
of independent sets which transforms I_b into I_r so that each independent set
in the sequence results from the previous one by sliding exactly one token
along an edge in the graph. The sliding token problem is one of the
reconfiguration problems that attract the attention from the viewpoint of
theoretical computer science. The reconfiguration problems tend to be
PSPACE-complete in general, and some polynomial time algorithms are shown in
restricted cases. Recently, the problems that aim at finding a shortest
reconfiguration sequence are investigated. For the 3SAT problem, a trichotomy
for the complexity of finding the shortest sequence has been shown, that is, it
is in P, NP-complete, or PSPACE-complete in certain conditions. In general,
even if it is polynomial time solvable to decide whether two instances are
reconfigured with each other, it can be NP-complete to find a shortest sequence
between them. Namely, finding a shortest sequence between two independent sets
can be more difficult than the decision problem of reconfigurability between
them. In this paper, we show that the problem for finding a shortest sequence
between two independent sets is polynomial time solvable for some graph classes
which are subclasses of the class of interval graphs. More precisely, we can
find a shortest sequence between two independent sets on a graph G in
polynomial time if either G is a proper interval graph, a trivially perfect
graph, or a caterpillar. As far as the authors know, this is the first
polynomial time algorithm for the shortest sliding token problem for a graph
class that requires detours
Homomorphism Reconfiguration via Homotopy
We consider the following problem for a fixed graph H: given a graph G and two H-colorings of G, i.e. homomorphisms from G to H, can one be transformed into the other by changing one color at a time, maintaining an H-coloring throughout.This is the same as finding a path in the Hom(G,H) complex. For H=K_k this is the problem of finding paths between k-colorings, which was recently shown to be in P for kleq 3 and PSPACE-complete otherwise (Bonsma and Cereceda 2009, Cereceda et al. 2011).
We generalize the positive side of this dichotomy by providing an algorithm that solves the problem in polynomial time for any H with no C_4 subgraph. This gives a large class of constraints for which finding solutions to the Constraint Satisfaction Problem is NP-complete, but paths in the solution space can be found in polynomial time.
The algorithm uses a characterization of possible reconfiguration sequences (that is, paths in Hom(G,H)), whose main part is a purely topological condition described in terms of the fundamental groupoid of H seen as a topological space
Shortest Reconfiguration of Matchings
Imagine that unlabelled tokens are placed on the edges of a graph, such that
no two tokens are placed on incident edges. A token can jump to another edge if
the edges having tokens remain independent. We study the problem of determining
the distance between two token configurations (resp., the corresponding
matchings), which is given by the length of a shortest transformation. We give
a polynomial-time algorithm for the case that at least one of the two
configurations is not inclusion-wise maximal and show that otherwise, the
problem admits no polynomial-time sublogarithmic-factor approximation unless P
= NP. Furthermore, we show that the distance of two configurations in bipartite
graphs is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the size of the
symmetric difference of the source and target configurations, and obtain a
-factor approximation algorithm for every if
additionally the configurations correspond to maximum matchings. Our two main
technical tools are the Edmonds-Gallai decomposition and a close relation to
the Directed Steiner Tree problem. Using the former, we also characterize those
graphs whose corresponding configuration graphs are connected. Finally, we show
that deciding if the distance between two configurations is equal to a given
number is complete for the class , and deciding if the diameter of
the graph of configurations is equal to is -hard.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figure
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