Abstract
The cover polynomial introduced by Chung and Graham is a two-variate graph polynomial for directed graphs. It counts the (weighted) number of ways to cover a graph with disjoint directed cycles and paths, it is an interpolation between determinant and permanent, and it is believed to be a directed analogue of the Tutte polynomial. Jaeger, Vertigan, and Welsh showed that the Tutte polynomial is \(\sharp\)-hard to evaluate at all but a few special points and curves. It turns out that the same holds for the cover polynomial: We prove that, in almost the whole plane, the problem of evaluating the cover polynomial is \(\sharp\)-hard under polynomial-time Turing reductions, while only three points are easy. Our construction uses a gadget which is easier to analyze and more general than the XOR-gadget used by Valiant in his proof that the permanent is \(\sharp\)-complete.
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Bläser, M., Dell, H. (2007). Complexity of the Cover Polynomial. In: Arge, L., Cachin, C., Jurdziński, T., Tarlecki, A. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4596. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73420-8_69
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73420-8_69
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