5 research outputs found
Revlex-Initial 0/1-Polytopes
We introduce revlex-initial 0/1-polytopes as the convex hulls of
reverse-lexicographically initial subsets of 0/1-vectors. These polytopes are
special knapsack-polytopes. It turns out that they have remarkable extremal
properties. In particular, we use these polytopes in order to prove that the
minimum numbers f(d, n) of facets and the minimum average degree a(d, n) of the
graph of a d-dimensional 0/1-polytope with n vertices satisfy f(d, n) <= 3d and
a(d, n) <= d + 4. We furthermore show that, despite the sparsity of their
graphs, revlex-initial 0/1-polytopes satisfy a conjecture due to Mihail and
Vazirani, claiming that the graphs of 0/1-polytopes have edge-expansion at
least one.Comment: Accepted for publication in J. Comb. Theory Ser. A; 24 pages;
simplified proof of Theorem 1; corrected and improved version of Theorem 4
(the average degree is now bounded by d+4 instead of d+8); several minor
corrections suggested by the referee
The Simplex Algorithm in Dimension Three
We investigate the worst-case behavior of the simplex algorithm on linear programs with 3 variables, that is, on 3-dimensional simple polytopes. Among the pivot rules that we consider, the “random edge” rule yields the best asymptotic behavior as well as the most complicated analysis. All other rules turn out to be much easier to study, but also produce worse results: Most of them show essentially worst-possible behavior; this includes both Kalai’s “random-facet” rule, which is known to be subexponential without dimension restriction, as well as Zadeh’s deterministic history-dependent rule, for which no non-polynomial instances in general dimensions have been found so far