The competition number of a graph and the dimension of its hole space

The competition graph of a digraph D is a (simple undirected) graph which has the same vertex set as D and has an edge between x and y if and only if there exists a vertex v in D such that (x,v) and (y,v) are arcs of D. For any graph G, G together with sufficiently many isolated vertices is the competition graph of some acyclic digraph. The competition number k(G) of G is the smallest number of such isolated vertices. In general, it is hard to compute the competition number k(G) for a graph G and it has been one of important research problems in the study of competition graphs to characterize a graph by its competition number. Recently, the relationship between the competition number and the number of holes of a graph is being studied. A hole of a graph is a cycle of length at least 4 as an induced subgraph. In this paper, we conjecture that the dimension of the hole space of a graph is no smaller than the competition number of the graph. We verify this conjecture for various kinds of graphs and show that our conjectured inequality is indeed an equality for connected triangle-free graphs.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

The competition numbers of ternary Hamming graphs

It is known to be a hard problem to compute the competition number k(G) of a graph G in general. Park and Sano [13] gave the exact values of the competition numbers of Hamming graphs H(n,q) if $1 \leq n \leq 3$ or $1 \leq q \leq 2$. In this paper, we give an explicit formula of the competition numbers of ternary Hamming graphs.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Structure and Problem Hardness: Goal Asymmetry and DPLL Proofs in<br> SAT-Based Planning

In Verification and in (optimal) AI Planning, a successful method is to formulate the application as boolean satisfiability (SAT), and solve it with state-of-the-art DPLL-based procedures. There is a lack of understanding of why this works so well. Focussing on the Planning context, we identify a form of problem structure concerned with the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of the cost of achieving the individual planning goals. We quantify this sort of structure with a simple numeric parameter called AsymRatio, ranging between 0 and 1. We run experiments in 10 benchmark domains from the International Planning Competitions since 2000; we show that AsymRatio is a good indicator of SAT solver performance in 8 of these domains. We then examine carefully crafted synthetic planning domains that allow control of the amount of structure, and that are clean enough for a rigorous analysis of the combinatorial search space. The domains are parameterized by size, and by the amount of structure. The CNFs we examine are unsatisfiable, encoding one planning step less than the length of the optimal plan. We prove upper and lower bounds on the size of the best possible DPLL refutations, under different settings of the amount of structure, as a function of size. We also identify the best possible sets of branching variables (backdoors). With minimum AsymRatio, we prove exponential lower bounds, and identify minimal backdoors of size linear in the number of variables. With maximum AsymRatio, we identify logarithmic DPLL refutations (and backdoors), showing a doubly exponential gap between the two structural extreme cases. The reasons for this behavior -- the proof arguments -- illuminate the prototypical patterns of structure causing the empirical behavior observed in the competition benchmarks

Fragile Black Holes

The AdS/CFT correspondence may give a new way of understanding field theories in extreme conditions, as in the quark-gluon plasma phase of quark matter. The correspondence normally involves asymptotically AdS black holes with dual field theories which are defined on locally flat boundary spacetimes; the implicit assumption is that the distortions of spacetime which occur under extreme conditions do not affect the field theory in any unexpected way. However, AdS black holes are [to varying degrees] "fragile", in the sense that they become unstable to stringy effects when their event horizons are sufficiently distorted. This implies that field theories on curved backgrounds may likewise be unstable in a suitable sense. We investigate this phenomenon, focussing on the "fragility" of AdS black holes with flat event horizons. We find that, when they are distorted, these black holes are always unstable in string theory. This may have consequences for the detailed structure of the quark matter phase diagram at extreme values of the spacetime curvature.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures; reference added; to appear in Nuclear Physics