License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.34
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-104383
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2019/10438/
Go to the corresponding LIPIcs Volume Portal

Erickson, Jeff ; Wang, Yipu

Topologically Trivial Closed Walks in Directed Surface Graphs

pdf-format:
LIPIcs-SoCG-2019-34.pdf (2 MB)

Abstract

Let G be a directed graph with n vertices and m edges, embedded on a surface S, possibly with boundary, with first Betti number beta. We consider the complexity of finding closed directed walks in G that are either contractible (trivial in homotopy) or bounding (trivial in integer homology) in S. Specifically, we describe algorithms to determine whether G contains a simple contractible cycle in O(n+m) time, or a contractible closed walk in O(n+m) time, or a bounding closed walk in O(beta (n+m)) time. Our algorithms rely on subtle relationships between strong connectivity in G and in the dual graph G^*; our contractible-closed-walk algorithm also relies on a seminal topological result of Hass and Scott. We also prove that detecting simple bounding cycles is NP-hard.
We also describe three polynomial-time algorithms to compute shortest contractible closed walks, depending on whether the fundamental group of the surface is free, abelian, or hyperbolic. A key step in our algorithm for hyperbolic surfaces is the construction of a context-free grammar with O(g^2L^2) non-terminals that generates all contractible closed walks of length at most L, and only contractible closed walks, in a system of quads of genus g >= 2. Finally, we show that computing shortest simple contractible cycles, shortest simple bounding cycles, and shortest bounding closed walks are all NP-hard.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{erickson_et_al:LIPIcs:2019:10438,
  author =	{Jeff Erickson and Yipu Wang},
  title =	{{Topologically Trivial Closed Walks in Directed Surface Graphs}},
  booktitle =	{35th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2019)},
  pages =	{34:1--34:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-104-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{129},
  editor =	{Gill Barequet and Yusu Wang},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10438},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-104383},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.34},
  annote =	{Keywords: computational topology, surface-embedded graphs, homotopy, homology, strong connectivity, hyperbolic geometry, medial axes, context-free grammars}
}

Keywords: computational topology, surface-embedded graphs, homotopy, homology, strong connectivity, hyperbolic geometry, medial axes, context-free grammars
Collection: 35th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2019)
Issue Date: 2019
Date of publication: 11.06.2019

DROPS-Home | Fulltext Search | Imprint | Privacy Published by LZI