63 research outputs found
Reconstructing Polyatomic Structures from Discrete X-Rays: NP-Completeness Proof for Three Atoms
We address a discrete tomography problem that arises in the study of the
atomic structure of crystal lattices. A polyatomic structure T can be defined
as an integer lattice in dimension D>=2, whose points may be occupied by
distinct types of atoms. To ``analyze'' T, we conduct ell measurements that we
call_discrete X-rays_. A discrete X-ray in direction xi determines the number
of atoms of each type on each line parallel to xi. Given ell such non-parallel
X-rays, we wish to reconstruct T.
The complexity of the problem for c=1 (one atom type) has been completely
determined by Gardner, Gritzmann and Prangenberg, who proved that the problem
is NP-complete for any dimension D>=2 and ell>=3 non-parallel X-rays, and that
it can be solved in polynomial time otherwise.
The NP-completeness result above clearly extends to any c>=2, and therefore
when studying the polyatomic case we can assume that ell=2. As shown in another
article by the same authors, this problem is also NP-complete for c>=6 atoms,
even for dimension D=2 and axis-parallel X-rays. They conjecture that the
problem remains NP-complete for c=3,4,5, although, as they point out, the proof
idea does not seem to extend to c<=5.
We resolve the conjecture by proving that the problem is indeed NP-complete
for c>=3 in 2D, even for axis-parallel X-rays. Our construction relies heavily
on some structure results for the realizations of 0-1 matrices with given row
and column sums
Non-clairvoyant Scheduling Games
In a scheduling game, each player owns a job and chooses a machine to execute
it. While the social cost is the maximal load over all machines (makespan), the
cost (disutility) of each player is the completion time of its own job. In the
game, players may follow selfish strategies to optimize their cost and
therefore their behaviors do not necessarily lead the game to an equilibrium.
Even in the case there is an equilibrium, its makespan might be much larger
than the social optimum, and this inefficiency is measured by the price of
anarchy -- the worst ratio between the makespan of an equilibrium and the
optimum. Coordination mechanisms aim to reduce the price of anarchy by
designing scheduling policies that specify how jobs assigned to a same machine
are to be scheduled. Typically these policies define the schedule according to
the processing times as announced by the jobs. One could wonder if there are
policies that do not require this knowledge, and still provide a good price of
anarchy. This would make the processing times be private information and avoid
the problem of truthfulness. In this paper we study these so-called
non-clairvoyant policies. In particular, we study the RANDOM policy that
schedules the jobs in a random order without preemption, and the EQUI policy
that schedules the jobs in parallel using time-multiplexing, assigning each job
an equal fraction of CPU time
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