268 research outputs found
Pancake Flipping is Hard
Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different
sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a
spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to
perform a prefix reversal). In the burnt variant, one side of each pancake is
marked as burnt, and it is required to finish with all pancakes having the
burnt side down. Computing the optimal scenario for any stack of pancakes and
determining the worst-case stack for any stack size have been challenges over
more than three decades. Beyond being an intriguing combinatorial problem in
itself, it also yields applications, e.g. in parallel computing and
computational biology. In this paper, we show that the Pancake Flipping
problem, in its original (unburnt) variant, is NP-hard, thus answering the
long-standing question of its computational complexity.Comment: Corrected reference
Graph Motif Problems Parameterized by Dual
Let G=(V,E) be a vertex-colored graph, where C is the set of colors used to color V. The Graph Motif (or GM) problem takes as input G, a multiset M of colors built from C, and asks whether there is a subset S subseteq V such that (i) G[S] is connected and (ii) the multiset of colors obtained from S equals M. The Colorful Graph Motif problem (or CGM) is a constrained version of GM in which M=C, and the List-Colored Graph Motif problem (or LGM) is the extension of GM in which each vertex v of V may choose its color from a list L(v) of colors.
We study the three problems GM, CGM and LGM, parameterized by l:=|V|-|M|. In particular, for general graphs, we show that, assuming the strong exponential-time hypothesis, CGM has no (2-epsilon)^l * |V|^{O(1)}-time algorithm, which implies that a previous algorithm, running in O(2^lcdot |E|) time is optimal. We also prove that LGM is W[1]-hard even if we restrict ourselves to lists of at most two colors. If we constrain the input graph to be a tree, then we show that, in contrast to CGM, GM can be solved in O(4^l *|V|) time but admits no polynomial kernel, while CGM can be solved in O(sqrt{2}^l + |V|) time and admits a polynomial kernel
Acyclic Coloring of Graphs of Maximum Degree
International audienceAn acyclic coloring of a graph is a coloring of its vertices such that: (i) no two neighbors in are assigned the same color and (ii) no bicolored cycle can exist in . The acyclic chromatic number of is the least number of colors necessary to acyclically color , and is denoted by . We show that any graph of maximum degree has acyclic chromatic number at most for any , and we give an algorithm to acyclically color any graph of maximum degree with the above mentioned number of colors. This result is roughly two times better than the best general upper bound known so far, yielding . By a deeper study of the case , we also show that any graph of maximum degree can be acyclically colored with at most colors, and give a linear time algorithm to achieve this bound
What Makes the Arc-Preserving Subsequence Problem Hard?
International audienceGiven two arc-annotated sequences (S, P ) and (T, Q) representing RNA structures, the Arc-Preserving Subsequence (APS) problem asks whether (T, Q) can be obtained from (S, P ) by deleting some of its bases (together with their incident arcs, if any). In previous studies [3, 6], this problem has been naturally divided into subproblems reïŹecting intrinsic complexity of arc structures. We show that APS(Crossing, Plain) is NP-complete, thereby answering an open problem [6]. Furthermore, to get more insight into where actual border of APS hardness is, we reïŹne APS classical subproblems in much the same way as in [11] and give a complete categorization among various restrictions of APS problem complexity
Decomposing Cubic Graphs into Connected Subgraphs of Size Three
Let be the set of connected graphs of size 3. We
study the problem of partitioning the edge set of a graph into graphs taken
from any non-empty . The problem is known to be NP-complete for
any possible choice of in general graphs. In this paper, we assume that
the input graph is cubic, and study the computational complexity of the problem
of partitioning its edge set for any choice of . We identify all polynomial
and NP-complete problems in that setting, and give graph-theoretic
characterisations of -decomposable cubic graphs in some cases.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of COCOON 201
Finding Occurrences of Protein Complexes in Protein-Protein Interaction Graphs
International audienceIn the context of comparative analysis of protein-protein interaction graphs, we use a graph-based formalism to detect the preservation of a given protein complex G in the protein-protein interaction graph H of another species with respect to (w.r.t.) orthologous proteins. Two problems are considered: the Exact-(G; H)-Matching problem and the Max-(G; H)-Matching problems, where G (resp. H) denotes in both problems the maximum number of orthologous proteins in H (resp. G) of a protein in G (resp. H). Following [10], the Exact-(G; H)-Matching problem asks for an injective homomorphism of G to H w.r.t. orthologous proteins. The optimization version is called the Max-(G; H)-Matching problem and is concerned with finding an injective mapping of a graph G to a graph H w.r.t. orthologous proteins that matches as many edges of G as possible. For both problems, we essentially focus on bounded degree graphs and extremal small values of parameters G and H
Obtaining a Triangular Matrix by Independent Row-Column Permutations
International audienceGiven a square (0, 1)-matrix A, we consider the problem of deciding whether there exists a permutation of the rows and a permutation of the columns of A such that after carrying out these permutations , the resulting matrix is triangular. The complexity of the problem was posed as an open question by Wilf [7] in 1997. In 1998, DasGupta et al. [3] seemingly answered the question, proving it is NP-complete. However , we show here that their result is flawed, which leaves the question still open. Therefore, we give a definite answer to this question by proving that the problem is NP-complete. We finally present an exponential-time algorithm for solving the problem
Minimum feedback vertex set and acyclic coloring
International audienceIn the feedback vertex set problem, the aim is to minimize, in a connected graph G =(V,E), the cardinality of the set overline(V) (G) \subseteq V , whose removal induces an acyclic subgraph. In this paper, we show an interesting relationship between the minimum feedback vertex set problem and the acyclic coloring problem (which consists in coloring vertices of a graph G such that no two colors induce a cycle in G). Then, using results from acyclic coloring, as well as other techniques, we are able to derive new lower and upper bounds on the cardinality of a minimum feedback vertex set in large families of graphs, such as graphs of maximum degree 3, of maximum degree 4, planar graphs, outerplanar graphs, 1-planar graphs, k-trees, etc. Some of these bounds are tight (outerplanar graphs, k-trees), all the others differ by a multiplicative constant never exceeding 2
Fixed-Parameter Algorithms For Protein Similarity Search Under mRNA Structure Constraints
International audienceIn the context of protein engineering, we consider the problem of computing an mRNA sequence of maximal codon-wise similarity to a given mRNA (and consequently, to a given protein) that additionally satisfies some secondary structure constraints, the so-called mRNA Structure Optimization (MRSO) problem. Since MRSO is known to be APX-hard, Bongartz [10] suggested to attack the problem using the approach of parameterized complexity. In this paper we propose three fixed-parameter algorithms that apply for several interesting parameters of MRSO. We believe these algorithms to be relevant for practical applications today, as well as for possible future applications. Furthermore, our results extend the known tractability borderline of MRSO, and provide new research horizons for further improvements of this sort
Obtaining a Triangular Matrix by Independent Row-Column Permutations
International audienceGiven a square (0, 1)-matrix A, we consider the problem of deciding whether there exists a permutation of the rows and a permutation of the columns of A such that after carrying out these permutations , the resulting matrix is triangular. The complexity of the problem was posed as an open question by Wilf [7] in 1997. In 1998, DasGupta et al. [3] seemingly answered the question, proving it is NP-complete. However , we show here that their result is flawed, which leaves the question still open. Therefore, we give a definite answer to this question by proving that the problem is NP-complete. We finally present an exponential-time algorithm for solving the problem
- âŠ