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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4271))

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Abstract

We introduce divide-and-color, a new technique for the solution of hard graph problems. It is a combination of the well-known divide-and-conquer paradigm and color-coding [2]. Our approach first randomly colors all edges or nodes of a graph black and white, and then solves the problem recursively on the two induced parts.

We demonstrate this technique by giving new randomized algorithms for the solution of two important problems. These yield runtime bounds of O *(4k) for finding a simple path of length k and O *(4( h − − 1) k) for finding k edge-disjoint (resp. vertex-disjoint) copies of a graph H with h edges (resp. h nodes) in a given graph. Derandomization gives deterministic algorithms for these problems with running times O *(24 k) and O *(24hk), respectively.

All these results significantly improve over the currently known best bounds. In particular, our generic algorithms beat specialized ones that have been designed to find k triangles or paths of length two.

Supported by the DFG under grant RO 927/6-1 (TAPI).

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kneis, J., Mölle, D., Richter, S., Rossmanith, P. (2006). Divide-and-Color. In: Fomin, F.V. (eds) Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science. WG 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4271. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11917496_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11917496_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-48381-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48382-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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