3 research outputs found
Tight bounds for undirected graph exploration with pebbles and multiple agents
We study the problem of deterministically exploring an undirected and
initially unknown graph with vertices either by a single agent equipped
with a set of pebbles, or by a set of collaborating agents. The vertices of the
graph are unlabeled and cannot be distinguished by the agents, but the edges
incident to a vertex have locally distinct labels. The graph is explored when
all vertices have been visited by at least one agent. In this setting, it is
known that for a single agent without pebbles bits of memory
are necessary and sufficient to explore any graph with at most vertices. We
are interested in how the memory requirement decreases as the agent may mark
vertices by dropping and retrieving distinguishable pebbles, or when multiple
agents jointly explore the graph. We give tight results for both questions
showing that for a single agent with constant memory
pebbles are necessary and sufficient for exploration. We further prove that the
same bound holds for the number of collaborating agents needed for exploration.
For the upper bound, we devise an algorithm for a single agent with constant
memory that explores any -vertex graph using
pebbles, even when is unknown. The algorithm terminates after polynomial
time and returns to the starting vertex. Since an additional agent is at least
as powerful as a pebble, this implies that agents
with constant memory can explore any -vertex graph. For the lower bound, we
show that the number of agents needed for exploring any graph of size is
already when we allow each agent to have at most
bits of memory for any .
This also implies that a single agent with sublogarithmic memory needs
pebbles to explore any -vertex graph
The Reduced Automata Technique for Graph Exploration Space Lower Bounds
We consider the task of exploring graphs with anonymous nodes by a team of non-cooperative robots, modeled as finite automata. For exploration to be completed, each edge of the graph has to be traversed by at least one robot. In this paper, the robots have no a priori knowledge of the topology of the graph, nor of its size, and we are interested in the amount of memory the robots need to accomplish exploration, We introduce the so-called {\em reduced automata technique}, and we show how to use this technique for deriving several space lower bounds for exploration. Informally speaking, the reduced automata technique consists in reducing a robot to a simpler form that preserves its ācoreā behavior on some graphs. Using this technique, we first show that any set of non-cooperative robots, requires memory bits to explore all -node graphs. The proof implies that, for any set of -state robots, there exists a graph of size that no robot of this set can explore, which improves the bound by Rollik (1980). Our main result is an application of this latter result, concerning {\em terminating} graph exploration with one robot, i.e., in which the robot is requested to stop after completing exploration. For this task, the robot is provided with a pebble, that it can use to mark nodes (without such a marker, even terminating exploration of cycles cannot be achieved). We prove that terminating exploration requires bits of memory for a robot achieving this task in all -node graphs