In discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, reconfiguration problems are computational problems involving reachability or connectivity of state spaces.
Here, a state space is a discrete set of configurations of a system or solutions of a combinatorial problem, called states, together with a set of allowed moves linking one state to another. Reconfiguration problems may ask:
Examples of problems studied in reconfiguration include:
In computational complexity theory, a decision problem is PSPACE-complete if it can be solved using an amount of memory that is polynomial in the input length and if every other problem that can be solved in polynomial space can be transformed to it in polynomial time. The problems that are PSPACE-complete can be thought of as the hardest problems in PSPACE, the class of decision problems solvable in polynomial space, because a solution to any one such problem could easily be used to solve any other problem in PSPACE.
In computational complexity theory, the complexity class EXPTIME (sometimes called EXP or DEXPTIME) is the set of all decision problems that are solvable by a deterministic Turing machine in exponential time, i.e., in O(2p(n)) time, where p(n) is a polynomial function of n.
In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Hamiltonian path is a path in an undirected or directed graph that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian cycle is a cycle that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian path that starts and ends at adjacent vertices can be completed by adding one more edge to form a Hamiltonian cycle, and removing any edge from a Hamiltonian cycle produces a Hamiltonian path. Determining whether such paths and cycles exist in graphs are NP-complete.
Combinatorial game theory measures game complexity in several ways:
In computational geometry, polygon triangulation is the partition of a polygonal area P into a set of triangles, i.e., finding a set of triangles with pairwise non-intersecting interiors whose union is P.
A Euclidean minimum spanning tree of a finite set of points in the Euclidean plane or higher-dimensional Euclidean space connects the points by a system of line segments with the points as endpoints, minimizing the total length of the segments. In it, any two points can reach each other along a path through the line segments. It can be found as the minimum spanning tree of a complete graph with the points as vertices and the Euclidean distances between points as edge weights.
In geometry, a simple polygon is a polygon that does not intersect itself and has no holes. That is, they are piecewise-linear Jordan curves consisting of finitely many line segments. They include as special cases the convex polygons, star-shaped polygons, and monotone polygons.
In computational complexity, problems that are in the complexity class NP but are neither in the class P nor NP-complete are called NP-intermediate, and the class of such problems is called NPI. Ladner's theorem, shown in 1975 by Richard E. Ladner, is a result asserting that, if P ≠ NP, then NPI is not empty; that is, NP contains problems that are neither in P nor NP-complete. Since it is also true that if NPI problems exist, then P ≠ NP, it follows that P = NP if and only if NPI is empty.
In the study of graph algorithms, an implicit graph representation is a graph whose vertices or edges are not represented as explicit objects in a computer's memory, but rather are determined algorithmically from some other input, for example a computable function.
In computational complexity theory and combinatorics, the token reconfiguration problem is a reconfiguration problem on a graph with both an initial and desired state for tokens.
In theoretical computer science, nondeterministic constraint logic is a combinatorial system in which an orientation is given to the edges of a weighted undirected graph, subject to certain constraints. One can change this orientation by steps in which a single edge is reversed, subject to the same constraints. The constraint logic problem and its variants have been proven to be PSPACE-complete to determine whether there exists a sequence of moves that reverses a specified edge and are very useful to show various games and puzzles are PSPACE-hard or PSPACE-complete.
In geometric graph theory, a penny graph is a contact graph of unit circles. It is formed from a collection of unit circles that do not cross each other, by creating a vertex for each circle and an edge for every pair of tangent circles. The circles can be represented physically by pennies, arranged without overlapping on a flat surface, with a vertex for each penny and an edge for each two pennies that touch.
In graph theory, precoloring extension is the problem of extending a graph coloring of a subset of the vertices of a graph, with a given set of colors, to a coloring of the whole graph that does not assign the same color to any two adjacent vertices.
In the mathematics of graph coloring, Cereceda’s conjecture is an unsolved problem on the distance between pairs of colorings of sparse graphs. It states that, for two different colorings of a graph of degeneracy d, both using at most d + 2 colors, it should be possible to reconfigure one coloring into the other by changing the color of one vertex at a time, using a number of steps that is quadratic in the size of the graph. The conjecture is named after Luis Cereceda, who formulated it in his 2007 doctoral dissertation.
In discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, the rotation distance between two binary trees with the same number of nodes is the minimum number of tree rotations needed to reconfigure one tree into another. Because of a combinatorial equivalence between binary trees and triangulations of convex polygons, rotation distance is equivalent to the flip distance for triangulations of convex polygons.
In computational geometry, a polygonalization of a finite set of points in the Euclidean plane is a simple polygon with the given points as its vertices. A polygonalization may also be called a polygonization, simple polygonalization, Hamiltonian polygon, non-crossing Hamiltonian cycle, or crossing-free straight-edge spanning cycle.