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An Average Case NP-complete Graph Colouring Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2018

LEONID A. LEVIN  and
RAMARATHNAM VENKATESAN
LEONID A. LEVIN
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Boston University, 111 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215, USA (home page: www.cs.bu.edu/fac/lnd/)
RAMARATHNAM VENKATESAN
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, USA (e-mail: venkie@microsoft.com)
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Abstract

NP-complete problems should be hard on some instances but those may be extremely rare. On generic instances many such problems, especially related to random graphs, have been proved to be easy. We show the intractability of random instances of a graph colouring problem: this graph problem is hard on average unless all NP problems under all samplable (i.e. generatable in polynomial time) distributions are easy. Worst case reductions use special gadgets and typically map instances into a negligible fraction of possible outputs. Ours must output nearly random graphs and avoid any super-polynomial distortion of probabilities. This poses significant technical difficulties.

Keywords

Primary 60C05Secondary 68Q1768Q2505C1505C80
Type
Paper
Information
Combinatorics, Probability and Computing , Volume 27 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 808 - 828
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

†An abstract of a 20-colour version of this result is in [31] and updates in arXiv:0112001.

§

This work was supported by NSF grant CCF-1049505.

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