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Complexity of the Bollobás-Riordan Polynomial

Exceptional Points and Uniform Reductions

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Computer Science – Theory and Applications (CSR 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5010))

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Abstract

The coloured Tutte polynomial by Bollobás and Riordan is, as a generalization of the Tutte polynomial, the most general graph polynomial for coloured graphs that satisfies certain contraction-deletion identities. Jaeger, Vertigan, and Welsh showed that the classical Tutte polynomial is #P-hard to evaluate almost everywhere by establishing reductions along curves and lines.

We establish a similar result for the coloured Tutte polynomial on integral domains. To capture the algebraic flavour and the uniformity inherent in this type of result, we introduce a new kind of reductions, uniform algebraic reductions, that are well-suited to investigate the evaluation complexity of graph polynomials. Our main result identifies a small, algebraic set of exceptional points and says that the evaluation problem of the coloured Tutte is equivalent for all non-exceptional points, under polynomial-time uniform algebraic reductions.

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Edward A. Hirsch Alexander A. Razborov Alexei Semenov Anatol Slissenko

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Bläser, M., Dell, H., Makowsky, J.A. (2008). Complexity of the Bollobás-Riordan Polynomial. In: Hirsch, E.A., Razborov, A.A., Semenov, A., Slissenko, A. (eds) Computer Science – Theory and Applications. CSR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5010. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79709-8_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79709-8_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-79708-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-79709-8

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