In our paper [LICS'18] a generalization of Boolean circuits to arbitrary finite algebras was introduced and applied to sketch P versus NP-complete borderline for circuits satisfiability over algebras from congruence modular varieties. However nilpotent but not supernilpotent algebras have not been put on any side of this borderline.

This paper provides a broad class of examples, lying in this grey area, and show that, under the Exponential Time Hypothesis and Strong Exponential Size Hypothesis (saying that Boolean circuits need exponentially many modular counting gates to produce Boolean conjunctions of any arity), satisfiability over these algebras have intermediate complexity. We also sketch how these examples could be used as paradigms to fill the nilpotent versus supernilpotent gap in general.

Our examples are striking in view of the natural strong connections between circuits satisfiability and Constraint Satisfaction Problem for which the dichotomy was shown by Bulatov and Zhuk.

Joint work with Piotr Kawałek and Jacek Krzaczkowski

For many hard problems, instead of solving them directly, we need good approximation algorithms. Apart from good their time complexity and decent approximation factor guarantee, we would like to know whether they achieve the best possible approximation ratio (assuming P ≠ NP) possible. Unfortunately, for many NP-complete problems, there is a huge gap between best-known approximation ratio and the ratio that is proved to be unachievable in polynomial time. For instance, for Vertex Cover problem, we don't know any algorithm having a better ratio than 2, and it has been proved in 2005 that it is impossible to get a better ratio than ~1.36. As an attempt to fill in this gap, in 2002, the so-called Unique Games Conjecture was formulated by Khot. It states that having a (1-𝜀)-satisfiable instance of Unique Label Cover problem, it is NP-hard to find a solution satisfying even epsilon fraction of constraints. Assuming it, we are able to prove many tight inapproximability results, for example, it implies that Goemans-Williamson Algorithm for Max-Cut problem achieves the best possible approximation rate. It also follows that we cannot get any better ratio than 2 in the case of Vertex Cover problem. The Unique Games Conjecture is an unusual open problem since the academic world is about evenly divided on whether it is true or not. During the seminar, I will cover this conjecture in more details giving more examples of its influence and presenting recent progress in order to prove it.

1. Subhash Khot. On the Unique Games Conjecture (Invited Survey). 2010 IEEE 25th Annual Conference on Computational Complexity, Cambridge, MA, 2010, pp. 99-121.
2. Bartosz Wodziński. Unique Games Conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

Abstract. Suppose that k runners having different constant speeds run laps on a circular track of unit length. The Lonely Runner Conjecture states that, sooner or later, any given runner will be at distance at least 1/k from all the other runners. We prove that with probability tending to one, a much stronger statement holds for random sets in which the bound 1/k is replaced by 1/2 − ε. The proof uses Fourier analytic methods. We also point out some consequences of our result for colouring of random integer distance graphs.

1. Gabriela Czarska. Lonely runner conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

Oblivious routing is a routing problem, in which a packet path is selected independently from path choices of other packets. One of the open problems is to find networks for which there exists an oblivious routing algorithm, which allows simultaneously optimizing stretch and congestion of the network. We are presenting an algorithm for oblivious routing on 2dgrid, which is O(log n) approximation for congestion and Θ(1) approximation of stretch.

(the seminar will only be online)

In 2013, Dankelmann, Key, and Rodrigues introduced and investigated codes from incidence matrices of a graph. Several authors have been developed their study to several context. In this talk, we present some properties of codes associated with zero divisor graphs. Recall, the zero divisor graph of R denoted by Γ(R), is the simple graph associated with R whose set of vertices consists of all nonzero zero-divisors of R such that two distinct vertices x and y are joined by an edge if xy = 0. This is joint work with K. Abdelmoumen, D. Bennis, and F. Taraza.

1. D. Bennis, J. Mikram, and F. Taraz. On the extended zero divisor graph of commutative rings. Turkish Journal of Mathematics. 40, 376-388, 2016.
2. P. Dankelmann, J. D. Key, and B. G. Rodrigues. Codes from incidence matrices of graphs. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 68, 373-393, 2013.
3. D. F. Anderson, P. S. Livingston. The Zero-Divisor Graph of a Commutative Ring. Journal of Algebra. 217(2), 434-447 , 1999.
4. Raja L'hamri.Codes from zero-divisor graphs. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

We all know how important mathematical theorems are in general. Less obvious is the fact that theorems in one area like algebra or number theory could have a significant impact on another. In our case, these will be combinatorial problems. In this presentation, We will go through a few simple graph coloring questions (based on the original 1-2-3 Conjecture), which unfortunately don't have simple solutions at all and we'll classify them. Moreover, thanks to Combinatorial Nullstellensatz and some greedy techniques, we will be able to prove some weaker versions of our original claims. And finally, we will see how one simple question, through a chain of small modifications, can lead us to completely different problems.

1. Michał Stobierski. The 1-2-3 Conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

The square G² of a graph G is the graph with the same vertex set in which two vertices are joined by an edge if their distance in G is at most two. The chromatic number of the square of a graph G is between D + 1 and D² + 1, where D is the maximum degree of G. Equivalently, the square coloring of a graph is to color the vertices of a graph at distance at most 2 with different colors.

In 1977, Gerd Wegner proved that the square of cubic planar graphs is 8-colorable. He conjectured that his bound can be improved - the chromatic number of G² is at most 7, if D = 3, at most D + 5, if 4 ≤ D ≤ 7, and [3D / 2] + 1, otherwise. Wegner also gave some examples to illustrate that these upper bounds can be obtained.

C. Thomassen (2006) proved the conjecture is true for planar graphs with D = 3. The conjecture is still open for planar graphs with D ≥ 4. However several upper bounds in terms of maximum degree D have been proved as follows. In 1993, Jonas proved that χ(G²) ≤ 9D-19, for planar graphs with D ≥ 5. Agnarsson and Halldorson showed that for every planar graph G with maximum degree D ≥ 749, χ(G²) ≤ [9D / 5] + 2. Van den Heuvel and McGuinness (2003) showed that χ(G²) ≤ 2D + 25, Bordin (2002) proved that χ(G²) ≤ [9D / 5] + 1, if D ≥ 47, and Molloy and Salavatipour (2005) proved χ(G²) ≤ [5D / 3] + 78, moreover, χ(G²) ≤ [5D / 3] + 25 if D ≥ 241. Moreover, conjecture is confirmed in the case of outerplanar graphs and graphs without K₄ minor.

The aim of the seminar will be to present the main facts about Wegner’s conjecture and main techniques and ideas which were used to prove some upper bounds. The presentation will be based on my master thesis.

1. Rafał Byczek. Wegner’s conjecture Colouring the square of a planar graph. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

Destructive Shift Bribery is a problem in which we are given an election with a set of candidates and a set of voters, a budget , a despised candidate and price for shifting the despised candidate in the voters rankings. Our objective is to ensure that selected candidate cannot win the election. We're going to study the complexity of this problem under diffrent election methods.

1. Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, Piotr Faliszewski. Algorithms for Destructive Shift Bribery. arXiv:1810.01763. 2018.
2. Wojtek Grabis. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

Sharareh Alipour and Amir Jafari showed various upper bounds for minimal cardinality of (a,b)-dominating set. For positive integers a and b, a subset S ⊆ V(G) is an (a,b)-dominating set if every vertex v ∈ S is adjacent to at least a vertices inside S and every vertex v ∈ V\S is adjacent to at least b vertices inside S. To achieve upper bounds, the authors used Turan's Theorem and Lovasz Local Lemma. These tools allowed them to obtain well-known bounds in a simpler way or new improved bounds in some special cases, including regular graphs.

1. Sharareh Alipour, Amir Jafari. Upper Bounds for the Domination Numbers of Graphs Using Turán’s Theorem and Lovász Local Lemma. Graphs and Combinatorics, 35, 2019, 1153-1160.
2. Jan Mełech. Upper bounds for domination number. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

(the seminar will only be online)

3-flow-conjecture
“Every 4-edge-connected graph has a nowhere-zero 3-flow.”

Grötzsch proved that every triangle free (and loopless) planar graph is 3-colorable. By flow/coloring duality, this is equivalent to the statement that every 4-edge-connected planar graph has a nowhere-zero 3-flow. The 3-flow conjecture asserts that this is still true without the assumption of planarity.

Jaeger proved that 4-edge-connected graphs have nowhere-zero 4-flows. The following weak version of the 3-flow conjecture used to remain open until 2010, but the original 3-flow conjecture remains wide open.

C̶o̶n̶j̶e̶c̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ (The weak 3-flow conjecture (Jaeger))
“There exists a fixed integer k so that every k-edge-connected graph has a nowhere-zero 3-flow.” 

These problems and the surrounding results will be presented during the seminar.

1. Carsten Thomassen. The weak 3-flow conjecture and the weak circular flow conjecture. Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 102(2), 2012, 521-529.
2. Fuyuan Chen, Bo Ning. A note on nowhere-zero 3-flow and Z_3-connectivity. arXiv:1406.1554. 2014.
3. Michał Zwonek. Nowhere Zero Flow and related open problems, slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

If a graph has bounded clique number and sufficiently large chromatic number, what can we say about its induced subgraphs? To answer that question Paul Seymour and Alex Scott took a closer look at recent progress in this field in their χ-boundedness survey. Based on their work I will present some results on forests and holes and few open problems like Gyárfás-Sumner conjecture or χ-boundedness connection to Erdős-Hajnal conjecture.

1. Alex Scott, Paul Seymour. A survey of χ-boundedness. arXiv:1812.07500. 2018.
2. Mateusz Kaczmarek. χ-boundedness, slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

A number is perfect if it is equal to the sum of its divisors. So far only even perfect numbers have been found. For example, it was proven that squares of Mersenne’s numbers are perfect. However, no one has been able to prove that odd perfect numbers don’t exist. I’m going to start by presenting a summary of known facts about odd prime numbers. Then I’ll prove that an odd perfect number with at least eight distinct prime factors has to be divisible by 5.

1. John Voight. On the nonexistence of odd perfect numbers. MASS selecta, 293–300, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2003.
2. Kornel Dulęba. Perfect Numbers. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

One of number theory open problem is the Lonely Runner Conjecture. It is interesting for several reasons. First the conjecture is relatively intuitive to grasp and easy to state. This conjecture can be find in two different contexts: as a problem in Diophantine’s approximation and as a geometric view obstruction problem. What is more, the difficulty of proving the Lonely Runner Conjecture may seem to increase exponentially with the number of runners. I present statement of the conjecture and known partial results.

1. Clayton Barnes II. The Lonely Runner Conjecture. arXiv:1211.2482. 2012.
2. Thomas W. Cusick, Jorg M. Wills. Lonely runner conjecture. Open Problem Garden. 2007.
3. Bartłomiej Jachowicz. Lonely Runner Conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

A cops and robbers problem determines if the number of cops is sufficient to always catch a robber in a game with defined rules played on an undirected graph. Cop number of a graph is the minimal number of cops necessary for cops to win in that game on the specific graph. Mayniel’s conjuncture remains an open problem and states that cop number for graphs of order n is sqrt(n). I’ll present a survey of results achieved that are related to this conjecture.

1. William Baird, Anthony Bonato. Meyniel's conjecture on the cop number: a survey. arXiv:1308.3385. 2013.
2. Filip Bartodziej. Meyniel’s conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

I present many results and finally open problem related to synchronizing automata and synchronizing word sends any state of the DFA to one and the same state. This leads to the some natural problems such as: how can we restore control over such a device if we don't know its current state but can observe outputs produced by the device under various actions? I prove some uperbounds for length of this kind of word and in particular I will make a statement of Cerny conjecture.

1. Mikhail V. Volkov. Synchronizing Automata and the Černý Conjecture. LATA 2008. 11-27.
2. Mateusz Pabian. Synchronizing Automata and the Černý Conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

The advice model of online computation captures the setting in which the online algorithm is given some partial information concerning the request sequence. We study online computation in a setting in which the advice is provided by an untrusted source. Our objective is to quantify the impact of untrusted advice so as to design and analyze online algorithms that are robust and perform well even when the advice is generated in a malicious, adversarial manner.To this end, we focus on well-studied online problems such as ski rental, online bidding, bin packing, and list update.

1. Spyros Angelopoulos, Christoph Durr, Shendan Jin, Shahin Kamali, and Marc Renault. Online Computation with Untrusted Advice. arXiv:1905.05655. 2019.
2. Adrian Siwiec. Online Computation with Untrusted Advice. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

Seymour's Second Neighbourhood Conjecture tells us, that any oriented graph has a vertex whose outdegree is at most its second outdegree, which is also known as Second neighborhood problem. Intuitively, it suggests that in a social network described by such a graph, someone will have at least as many friends-of-friends as friends. We will say about Chen-Shen-Yuster prove, that for any digraph D, there exists a vertex v such that |N⁺⁺(v)|≥γ|N⁺(v)|, where γ=0.67815. We will consider graphs, in which we know, that such vertex exists. We will also say about unsuccessful attempts at proving this conjecture.

1. Salman Ghazal. Seymour's second neighborhood conjecture for tournaments missing a generalized star. arXiv:1106.0085, 2011.
2. Tyler Seacrest. Seymour's Second Neighborhood Conjecture for Subsets of Vertices. arXiv:1106.0085, 2018.
3. Wojciech Buczek. Seymour’s Second Neighbourhood Conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

The Collatz conjecture, also known as 3n + 1 conjecture considers a function, which returns n/2 if n is even and 3n + 1 if n is odd. The conjecture states that for every n we can repeatedly apply this function to eventually reach 1. I will talk about different approaches to proving this conjecture.

1. Mikołaj Twaróg. Collatz conjecture. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

The game of edge geography is played by two players who alternately move a token on a graph from one vertex to an adjacent vertex, erasing the edge in between. The player who first has no legal move loses the game. We analyze the space complexity of the decision problem of determining whether a start position in this game is a win for the first player. We also show a polynomial time algorithm for finding winning moves for bipartite graphs.

1. Aviezri S. Fraenkel, Edward R. Scheinerman, Daniel Ullman. Undirected Edge Geography. Theoretical Computer Science, 112(2), 1993, 371-381.
2. Adam Pardyl. Undirected edge geography. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

Consider a directed graph such that every vertex has at most 2 outgoing edges - one of them is labeled as 'open' (we can traverse it) and the second one is labeled as 'closed' (we cannot traverse it). Every time we go somewhere from the vertex v, labels at its two edges are swapped, so the next time we visit v, we will take another direction. Given designated two vertices: origin and destination, we need to decide, whether eventually we will reach destination starting in the origin. This problem lies in both NP and coNP, but it is still an open question whether it belongs to P.

1. Jérôme Dohrau, Bernd Gärtner, Manuel Kohler, Jiří Matoušek, Emo Welzl. ARRIVAL: A zero-player graph game in NP ∩ coNP. arXiv:1605.03546. 2020.
2. Piotr Mikołajczyk. ARRIVAL game. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

Let P be a set of n points in R². A point q (not necessarily in P) is called a centerpoint of P if each closed half-plane containing q at least ⌈n/3⌉ points of P, or, equivalently, any convex set that contains more than ²/₃ n points of P must also contain q. It is a well-known fact that a centerpoint always exists and the constant ²/₃ is the best possible. Can we improve this constant by using, say, two points, or some other small number of points? In the presentation we'll try to answer those questions.

Vladyslav Rachek. Small weak epsilon-nets. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

The aim of this pearl is to solve the following well-known problem that appears in many puzzle books, for example Levitin & Levitin (2011) and Bellos (2016), usually for the particular case n=12.

There are n coins, all identical in appearance, one of which may be fake. The fake coin, if it exists, is either lighter or heavier than the fair coins, but it is not known which, nor by how much. Given is a balance with two pans but no weights. Equal number of coins can be placed on each pan and weighed. There are three possible outcomes: the left-hand pan may be lighter than the right-hand pan, or of equal weight, or heavier. Design a recipe for determining the minimum number of weighings guaranteed to determine the fake coin, if it exists, and whether it is lighter or heavier than the others.

During today presentation we will learn how we can use graph theory to proof hardness of general problem of manipulating poll outcome. Based on paper: "Selecting Voting Locations for Fun and Profit" written by Zack Fitzsimmons and Omer Lev.

Zack Fitzsimmons, Omer Lev. Selecting Voting Locations for Fun and Profit. arXiv:2003.06879. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

We will focus on Hadwiger-Nelson problem - an open question from geometric graph theory that asks for the minimum number of colors required to color the plane such that no two points at distance 1 from each other have the same color. There are a few interesting theorems related to the problem and results which we will go through. We will focus in particular on the most recent result of Aubrey de Grey who showed that the desired chromatic number is at least 5.

1. Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey. The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. arXiv:1804.02385. 2018.
2. Mateusz Tokarz. slides. 2020.

(the seminar will only be online)

In the paper authors consider certain variants of Graph Isomorphism problem. They focus on properties of graph spectra and eigenspaces - namely if Laplacian of one of the graphs is greater or equal to another in Loewner ordering. In the first part of the paper they prove that one of the problems named Spectral Graph Dominance is NPC. The rest of the paper is devoted to an approximation algorithm for special case of the problem called Spectrally Robust Graph Isomorphism.

Alexandra Kolla, Ioannis Koutis, Vivek Madan, Ali Kemal Sinop. Spectrally Robust Graph Isomorphism. arXiv:1805.00181, 1-17, 2018.

Authors study Uber's pricing mechanisms from the perspective of drivers, presenting the theoretical foundation that has informed the design of Uber’s new additive driver surge mechanism. They present a dynamic stochastic model to capture the impact of surge pricing on driver earnings and their strategies to maximize such earnings.

Nikhil Garg, Hamid Nazerzadeh. Driver Surge Pricing. arXiv. 2019.

The paper presents proof that the queue number of planar graphs is bounded. It also mentions generalizations of the result and other theorems that have similar proofs.

Vida Dujmović, Gwenaël Joret, Piotr Micek, Pat Morin, Torsten Ueckerdt, David R. Wood. Planar graphs have bounded queue-number. arXiv. 2019.

The notion of nowhere dense classes of graphs attracted much attention in recent years and found many applications in structural graph theory and algorithmics. The powers of nowhere dense graphs do not need to be sparse, for instance the second power of star graphs are complete graphs. However, it is believed that powers of sparse graphs inherit somewhat simple structure. In this spirit, we show that for a fixed nowhere dense class of graphs, a positive real ε and a positive integer d, in any n-vertex graph G in the class, there are disjoint vertex subsets A and B with |A|=Ω(n) and |B|=Ω(n^1-ε) such that in the d-th power of G, either there is no edge between A and B, or there are all possible edges between A and B.

Destructive Shift Bribery is a problem in which we are given an election with a set of candidates and a set of voters, a budget , a despised candidate and price for shifting the despised candidate in the voters rankings. Our objective is to ensure that selected candidate cannot win the election. We're going to study the complexity of this problem under diffrent election methods.

Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, Piotr Faliszewski. Algorithms for Destructive Shift Bribery. arXiv. 2018.

The paper shows that the Diffie-Hellman protocol is not as secure as we thought. The authors present the Logjam attack, which consists in quickly calculating discrete logarithms based on previously performed calculations. This can be done because many websites use the same prime numbers in the message encryption process.

David Adrian, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Zakir Durumeric, Pierrick Gaudry, Matthew Green, J. Alex Halderman, Nadia Heninger, Drew Springall, Emmanuel Thomé, Luke Valenta, Benjamin VanderSloot, Eric Wustrow, Santiago Zanella-Béguelink, Paul Zimmermann. Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice. WeakDH.org.

he consensus problem involves an asynchronous system of processes, some of which may be unreliable. The problem is for reliable processes to agree on a binary value. In this paper, it is shown that every protocol for this problem has the possibility of nontermination, even with only one faulty process. By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the “Byzantine Generals” problem.

Authors of the paper were awarded a Dijkstra Prize for this work - given to the most influential papers in distributed computing.

Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch, Michael S. Paterson. Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 32(2), 1985, 374-382.

Unevenly cut pizza is a frustrating occurrence. How can we then make sure that a friend is not trying to reduce our portion of the delicious meal? We will present a strategy which guarantees that one will leave the table satisfied, assuming that they started eating first.

Kolja Knauer, Piotr Micek, Torsten Ueckerdt. How to eat 4/9 of a pizza. arXiv. 2008.

I will present a proof that there exists a function f(d), such that there exists a 3-coloring of any planar graph G in which each monochromatic subgraph has at most f(d) vertices, where d is the degree of the highest-degree vertex in G.

Louis Esperet, Gwenaël Joret. Coloring planar graphs with three colors and no large monochromatic components. arXiv, 1303.2487. 2013.

Survey of Hadwiger's Conjecture from 1943, that for all t ≥ 0, every graph is either t-colorable or has a subgraph that can be contracted to the complete t+1 vertices graph. This conjecture is the tremendous strengthening of the four-color problem also known as map coloring problem.

Paul Seymour. Hadwiger’s conjecture.

The most studied linear algebraic operation, matrix multiplication, has surprisingly fast O(n^ω) time algorithms, for ω<2.373. On the other hand, the (min,+)-product, which is at the heart of APSP, is widely conjectured to require cubic time. There is a plethora of matrix products and graph problems whose complexity seems to lie in the middle of these two problems, e.g. the (min,max)-product, the min-witness product, APSP in directed unweighted graphs. The best runtimes for these "intermediate" problems are all O(n^(3+ω)/2). A similar phenomenon occurs for convolution problems.

Can one improve upon the running times for these intermediate problems? Or, alternatively, can one relate these problems to each other and to other key problems in a meaningful way?

We make progress on these questions by providing a network of fine-grained reductions. We show for instance that APSP in directed unweighted graphs and min-witness product can be reduced to both the (min,max)-product and a variant of the monochromatic triangle problem. We also show that a natural convolution variant of monochromatic triangle is equivalent to the famous 3SUM problem. As this variant is in O(n^3/2) time and 3SUM is in O(n²) time, our result gives the first fine-grained equivalence between natural problems of different running times.

Joint work with Andrea Lincoln and Virginia Vassilevska Williams.

During the seminar I will discuss a clever attack on RSA library used in Infineon chips. Researchers discovered that the prime factors used for constructing private keys have a peculiar form. This allowed them to use a modified version of Coppersmith algorithm to recover private key basing on their public counterpart in a reasonable time for keys up to 2048 bit long.

Dusan Klinec, Vashek Matyas, Matus Nemec, Marek Sys, Petr Svenda. The Return of Coppersmith’s A‚ack: Practical Factorization of Widely Used RSA Moduli.

Hackenbush is a two player game played on a graph with a few marked vertices. Players alternate turns. Each turn consists of removing one edge from the graph and all vertices that lost their connection to all marked ones. Player, that can't make a move, loses. I will present three different variants of Hackenbush(Red-Blue Hackenbush, Green Hackenbush and R-G-B Hackenbush) with methods to determine, which player has a winning strategy.

Padraic Bartlett. A Short Guide to Hackenbush. VIGRE REU 2006.

Gry parzystości to gry pomiędzy dwoma graczami (zwyczajowo Even oraz Odd) na grafie skierowanym G = (V, E). Gracze przesuwają między wierzchołkami wirtualny token, tworząc ścieżkę. Wierzchołki grafu są etykietowane liczbami naturalnymi i każdy z nich jest przypisany do jednego gracza, który decyduje w jakim kierunku zostanie wykonany ruch z tego wierzchołka. Celem każdego z graczy jest wybranie takiej strategii, że przy nieskończonej grze (ścieżce), najwyższa nieskończenie wiele razy powtarzająca się etykieta będzie odpowiednio parzysta bądź nieparzysta.

Problem gry parzystości jest deterministyczny, to znaczy dla każdego wierzchołka jeden z graczy posiada strategię wygrywającą. Rekurencyjny algorytm Zielonki rozwiązuje grę parzystości w czasie wykładniczym. Istnieje jednak algorytm działający w czasie quasi-wielomianowym, czyli 2^{O((log(n))^c)} dla pewnego, ustalonego c.

W trakcie prezentacji omówiony zostanie schemat nowej wersji algorytmu, przeprowadzona analiza jego złożoności oraz przedstawiony dowód poprawności zwracanego przez niego wyniku.

Recently, Yamazaki et al. provided an algorithm that enumerates all non-isomorphic interval graphs on n vertices with an O(n⁴) time delay between the output of two consecutive graphs. We improve their algorithm and achieve O(n³ log n) time delay. We also extend the catalog of these graphs providing a list of all non-isomorphic interval graphs for all n up to 15 (previous best was 12).

In the design of complex systems, model-checking and satisfiability arise as two prominent decision problems. While
model-checking requires the designed system to be provided in advance, satisfiability allows to check if such a system even exists. With very few exceptions, the second problem turns out to be harder than the first one from a complexity-theoretic standpoint. In this paper, we investigate the connection between the two problems for a non-trivial fragment of Strategy Logic (SL, for short). SL extends LTL with first-order quantifications over strategies, thus allowing to explicitly reason about the strategic abilities of agents in a multi-agent system. Satisfiability for the full logic is known to be highly undecidable, while model-checking is non-elementary.

The SL fragment we consider is obtained by preventing strategic quantifications within the scope of temporal operators. The resulting logic is quite powerful, still allowing to express important game-theoretic properties of multi-agent systems, such as existence of Nash and immune equilibria, as well as to formalize the rational synthesis problem. We show that satisfiability for such a fragment is PSPACE-COMPLETE, while its model-checking complexity is 2EXPTIME-HARD. The result is obtained by means of an elegant encoding of the problem into the satisfiability of conjunctive-binding first-order logic, a recently discovered decidable fragment of first-order logic.

We define a method for edge coloring signed graphs and what it means for such a coloring to be proper. It then turns out that Vizing's Theorem is a special case of the more difficult theorem concerning signed graphs.

Richard Behr. Edge Coloring Signed Graphs. arXiv. 2018.

We will discuss variations of a zero sum game where one player writes down two numbers on cards. The second player learns one of the numbers to make a guess which of the numbers is larger. We will show variations of the game where the second player has a greater chance of winning than 1/2.

Alexander Gnedin. Guess the Larger Number. arXiv. 2016.

Problem Izomorfizmu Poddrzew zadaje pytanie, czy dane drzewo zawarte jest w innym danym drzewie. Ten problem o zasadniczym znaczeniu dla algorytmiki jest badany już od lat 60. ubiegłego wieku. Podkwadratowe algorytmy znane są dla niektórych wariantów, np. drzew uporządkowanych, ale nie w ogólnym przypadku.

Poprzez redukcję z problemu Wektorów Ortogonalnych pokażemy, że prawdziwie podkwadratowy algorytm dla Izomorfizmu Poddrzew przeczy SETH. Dodatkowo pokażemy, że to samo ograniczenie dolne utrzymuje się również w przypadku ukorzenionych drzew o logarytmicznej wysokości. W opozycji do niego zaprezentujemy również podkwadratowy algorytm randomizowany dla drzew o stałym stopniu i logarytmicznej wysokości.

Redukcja korzysta z nowych "gadżetów drzewowych", które prawdopodobnie przydadzą się w przyszłości w wyznaczaniu ograniczeń dolnych opartych na SETH dla problemów na drzewach. Algorytmy opierają się na znanych wynikach o złożoności randomizowanych drzew decyzyjnych.

The density D(G) of a graph G is the maximum ratio of the number of edges to the number of vertices ranging over all subgraphs of G. For a class F of graphs, the value D(F) is the supremum of densities of graphs in F.

A k-edge-colored graph is a finite, simple graph with edges labeled by numbers 1,...,k. A function from the vertex set of one k-edge-colored graph to another is a homomorphism if the endpoints of any edge are mapped to two different vertices connected by an edge of the same color. Given a class F of graphs, a k-edge-colored graph H (not necessarily with the underlying graph in F) is k-universal for F when any k-edge-colored graph with the underlying graph in F admits a homomorphism to H. Such graphs are known to exist exactly for classes F of graphs with acyclic chromatic number bounded by a constant. The minimum number of vertices in a k-uniform graph for a class F is known to be Ω(k^D(F)) and O(k^d), where d is the ceiling of D(F) (result obtained in 2015 with Gutowski), and has been conjectured to be ϴ(k^D(F)).

In this talk, I will present a construction of a k-universal graph on O(k^d) vertices for any rational bound d on the density D(F). It follows that if D(F) is rational, the minimum number of vertices in a k-universal graph for F is indeed ϴ(k^D(F)).

Jie Gao, Terrence Wong, Chun Wang, and Jia Yuan Yu. A Price-Based Iterative Double Auction for Charger Sharing Markets. arXiv. 2019.

We prove that every intersection graph of axis-parallel rectangles in the plane with clique number ω has chromatic number O(ω log ω), which is the first improvement of the original O(ω²) bound of Asplund and Grünbaum from 1960. As a consequence, we obtain a polynomial-time O(log log n)-approximation algorithm for Maximum Weight Independent Set in axis-parallel rectangles, improving the previous best approximation ratio of O(log n/log log n).

Joint work with Parinya Chalermsook.

For any graph G and positive integer p we can consider "exact distance graph" G in which vertices x and y are connected if and only if their distance in G is exactly p. We can bound chromatic number of such graphs using notion of weak coloring numbers. Proof becomes particularly valuable for odd p and planar graphs G.

Jan van den Heuvel, H.A. Kierstead, Daniel A. Quiroz. Chromatic Numbers of Exact Distance Graphs. arXiv, abs/1612.02160. 2016.

A classic result of Erdős and Pósa (1965) states that for every graph G and every integer k, either G has k vertex-disjoint cycles, or G has a set of O(k log k) vertices meeting all cycles. The usual way of proving this theorem is through the so-called frame technique. In this talk I will describe another equally simple way of proving the theorem, using a ball packing argument. Then I will describe some applications of this method, including to the variant where only cycles of length at least l are considered.

Joint work with Henning Bruhn, Wouter Cames van Batenburg, and Arthur Ulmer.

It's commonly known that planar graphs are at most 4-colorable. One possible direction towards determining when planar graphs can be 3-colorable is to narrow to particular planar graphs with enforced structure. For example, one can forbid cycles of length 4,5,...,k where k>=4. There is a conjecture of Steinberg from 1976, that planar graphs without cycles of length 4 and 5 (as subgraphs) are 3-colorable. It has been open problem till 2016, when it was disproved in joint paper of Vincent Cohen-Addad, Michael Hebdige, Daniel Kral, Zhentao Li, Esteban Salgado, and we present proof from that paper.

Steinberg's Conjecture is false. Vincent Cohen-Addad, Michael Hebdige, Daniel Kral, Zhentao Li, Esteban Salgado. arXiv, abs/1604.05108. 2016.

We study the following separation problem: Given a collection of colored objects in the plane, compute a shortest "fence" F, i.e., a union of curves of minimum total length, that separates every two objects of different colors. Two objects are separated if F contains a simple closed curve that has one object in the interior and the other in the exterior. We refer to the problem as Geometric k-Cut, where k is the number of different colors, as it can be seen as a geometric analogue to the well-studied multicut problem on graphs. We first give an O(n⁴ log³ n)-time algorithm that computes an optimal fence for the case where the input consists of polygons of two colors and n corners in total. We then show that the problem is NP-hard for the case of three colors. Finally, we give a (2−4/3k)-approximation algorithm.

Joint work with Panos Giannopoulos, Maarten Löffler, and Günter Rote. Presented at ICALP 2019.

One of the variations of graph coloring is the assignment of colors to vertices such that for each v vertex, at most half of the neighbors v have the same color as v. Such coloring is called the majority coloring of the graph. The goal is to color the graph in the above way with the smallest number of colors. During the presentation various variants of this problem will be discussed, historical results, the latest results, and still intriguing hypotheses. Among other things, the effects of joint cooperation with Marcin Anholcer, Jarosław Grytczuk, and Gabriel Jakóbczak will be presented.

1. László Lovász, On decomposition of graphs Studia Scientiarum Mathematicarum Hungarica. A Quarterly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1, 237–238, 1966.
2. Paul D. Seymour, On the two-colouring of hypergraphs, The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics. Oxford. Second Series, 25, 303–312, 1974.
3. Dominic van der Zypen, Majority coloring for directed graphs MathOverflow, 2016.
4. Stephan Kreutzer, Sang-il Oum, Paul D. Seymour, Dominic van der Zypen, and David R. Wood, Majority colourings of digraphs, Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 24(2):Paper 2.25, 9, 2017.
5. Marcin Anholcer, Bartłomiej Bosek, Jarosław Grytczuk, Majority Choosability of Digraphs Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 24 (3), Paper 3.57, 2017.
6. António Girão, Teeradej Kittipassorn, Kamil Popielarz, Generalized majority colourings of digraphs, Combinatorics, Probability and Computing, 26(6), 850–855, 2017.
7. Fiachra Knox and Robert Šámal, Linear bound for majority colourings of digraphs, Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 25(3):Paper 3.29, 4, 2018.
8. Bartłomiej Bosek, Jarosław Grytczuk, Gabriel Jakóbczak, Majority Coloring Game, Discrete Applied Mathematics, 255, 15 – 20, 2019.

Tematem pracy jest problem znalezienia automatu skończonego rozróżniającego dwa łańcuchy o możliwie najmniejszej liczbie stanów. Autorzy pokazują, że dla łańcuchów ograniczonych przez długość n istnieje automat akceptujący tylko jeden z łańcuchów o O(n^2/5 * log^3/5n) stanach, co dla przypadku, gdy łańcuchy na wejściu są równej długości jest najlepszym znanym ograniczeniem.

During the seminar, we will discuss some open problems regarding the choosability number of planar graphs and related problems.

The Turán number ex(n, H) is the maximum number of edges that an H-free graph on n vertices can have. This quantity is well studied for graphs with chromatic number greater than 2, but the problem of determining it for all bipartite graphs remains open. A generalization of the Turán number, namely, the maximum possible number of copies of a graph T in an H-free graph on n vertices, denoted by ex(n, T, H), is recently attracting a lot of attention. In particular, the problem of determining ex(n, C₅, C₃), posed by Erdős in 1984, was completely solved in the last few years with the use of the flag algebras method.

In this talk, we will show an elementary proof that ex(n, C_k, C_k−2) = (n/k)^k + o(n^k) for any odd k > 5.

Joint work with Andrzej Grzesik.

It is a known fact that Sperner's purely combinatorial lemma of triangulation is equivalent to theorems in the field of topology: Brouwer with a fixed point and Knastra-Kuratowski-Mazurkiewicz on covering the symplex. Both of these topological theorems have stronger versions (Borsuk-Ulam and Lusternik-Schnirelmann theorems on anti-inflammatory points). In the paper, the authors show a combinatorial analogue of Borsuk-Ulam theorem and use it to directly prove the Sperner lemma, closing the stronger trinity of theorems.

Kathryn L. Nyman, Francis Edward Su. A Borsuk–Ulam Equivalent that Directly Implies Sperner's Lemma. The American Mathematical Monthly 120 (2017), no. 4, 346-354.

During the seminar I will present three statements about finite sets with evidence. Two of them are classic theorems of combinatorial power theory - theorems of Sperner and Erdős-Ko-Rado. The third of these is one of the most important theorems in finite set theory - the Hall theorem.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Chapter 27 of Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

Let 𝒞 and 𝒟 be hereditary graph classes. Consider the following problem: given a graph G ∈ 𝒟, find a largest, in terms of the number of vertices, induced subgraph of G that belongs to 𝒞. We prove that it is solvable in 2^o(n) time, where n is the number of vertices of G, if the following conditions are satisfied:

• the graphs in 𝒞 are sparse, i.e., they have linearly many edges in terms of the number of vertices;
• the graphs in 𝒟 admit balanced separators of size governed by their density, e.g., O(Δ) or O(√m), where Δ and m denote the maximum degree and the number of edges, respectively; and
• the considered problem admits a single-exponential fixed-parameter algorithm when parameterized by the treewidth of the input graph.

This leads, for example, to the following corollaries for specific classes 𝒞 and 𝒟:

• a largest induced forest in a P_t-free graph can be found in 2^Õ(n2/3) time, for every fixed t; and
• a largest induced planar graph in a string graph can be found in 2^Õ(n3/4) time.

Joint work with Jana Novotná, Karolina Okrasa, Michał Pilipczuk, Paweł Rzążewski, and Erik Jan van Leeuwen.

In computer game 'Lemmings', lemmings are placed in a level walking towards certain direction. When they encounter a wall, they turn and walk back in the direction they came from and when they encounter a hole, they fall. If a lemming falls beyond a certain distance, it dies. The goal is to guide lemmings to the exit by assigning them skills and modifying their behavior. I will show by polynomial-time reduction from 3-SAT that deciding whether particular level is solvable is an NP-Complete problem. This holds even if there is only one lemming in the level to save.

Graham Cormode. The Hardness of the Lemmings Game, or Oh no, more NP-Completeness Proofs.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

Parameterized algorithms can solve some optimization problems quickly, assuming a certain parameter is bounded: for example, when we aim to satisfy a SAT formula by setting at most k (out of n) variables to true. However, the same algorithms directly applied to the unbounded case (k = n) usually yield poor results. Here I will discuss a bridge between parameterized algorithms and general exact exponential-time algorithms. I will show a remarkably simple approach to obtaining a good exact exponential-time algorithm, given a good parameterized algorithm. The resulting algorithm will be randomized, but it is also possible to derandomize it with subexponential additional cost in the complexity. This approach, at the time of publishing, pushed the state-of-the-art for many optimization problems.

Fedor V. Fomin, Serge Gaspers, Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh. Exact Algorithms via Monotone Local Search. arXiv. 2015.

Listing and counting triangles in sparse graphs are well-studied problems. For a graph with m edges, Björklund et al. gave an O(m^1.408) algorithm which can list up to m triangles. The exact exponent depends on the exponent omega in matrix multiplication, and becomes 4/3 if omega=2. Pătraşcu proved that an algorithm faster than O(m^4/3) would imply a sub-quadratic algorithm for 3-SUM, which is considered unlikely.

In our work we consider a variant of triangle problem asking to determine for every edge the number of triangles which contains that edge. We prove that this problem is no easier than listing up to m triangles, although it still admits an algorithm of the same O(m^1.408) complexity. We also propose a natural class of range query problems, including for example the following problem: given a family of ranges in an array, compute the number of inversions in each of them. We prove that all the problems in this class are equivalent, under one-to-polylog reductions, to counting triangles for each edge. In particular the time complexities of these problems are the same up to polylogarithmic factors.

This is joint work of Lech Duraj, Krzysztof Kleiner, Adam Polak and Virginia Vassilevska-Williams.

Simple and effective algorithms solving the problem of finding maximum matchings in bipartite graphs had been known for years before a low-complexity algorithm for non-bipartite graphs was published for the first time. That algorithm is known as the Micali-Vazirani algorithm, and it constitutes an intricate combination of the Hopcroft-Karp algorithm for bipartite graphs and the Blossom algorithm for general graphs. It achieves the complexity of O(m√n), which demonstrates that matchings in general graphs are not harder to find than matchings in bipartite ones. We present an intuitive introduction to the algorithm, explaining its main definitions and procedures.

Vijay V. Vazirani. A Simplification of the MV Matching Algorithm and its Proof. arXiv. 2012.

During the seminar will be presented proofs of the seemingly geometrical problem of tiling a rectangle with tiles with at least one side of total length.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Chapter 26 of Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

Computer games are a well-studied branch of the theory of complexity. Many of them fit into a similar scheme, lying in the NP (and even NP-hard) and, thanks to Savitch's Theorem, in PSPACE (-hard). It turns out, however, that some of them, thanks to their unique mechanics, are able to simulate the operation of the Turing Machine and thus pose undecidable problems! An interesting example of such a game is Braid, on which this presentation is based. We will start by showing differences and similarities with other games, then we will show how to simulate the operation of the abstract 'counter machine' and talk about a particularly interesting variant of the game, which introduces an TM model that, when it writes to the tape, deletes all data on the tape to the right of the head. And despite the fact that it looks like simplified variant, it lies in EXPSPACE, making Braid a totally 'non-schematic' game.

In 1955 the number theorist Martin Kneser posed a seemingly innocuous problem that became one of the great challenges in graph theory until a brilliant and totally unexpected solution, using the “Borsuk–Ulam theorem” from topology, was found by László Lovász twenty-three years later. It happens often in mathematics that once a proof for a long-standing problem is found, a shorter one quickly follows, and so it was in this case. Within weeks Imre Bárány showed how to combine the Borsuk–Ulam theorem with another known result to elegantly settle Kneser’s conjecture. Then in 2002 Joshua Greene, an undergraduate student, simplified Bárány’s argument even further, and it is his version of the proof that I present here.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

Graph colorings and online algorithms on graphs constitute the key fragments of the algorithmic graph theory. Specifically, the subject of this study will be a presentation of the results concerning

• different variants of coloring of graphs and partially ordered sets,
• online coloring of partially ordered sets,
• incremental matchings of bipartite graphs.

The first part of the talk will concern different aspects of the coloring problem as well as different evidential techniques. The presented results concern majority choosability of digraphs, harmonious coloring of hypergraphs and semi-uni conjecture of product of two posets. The next part of presentation will concern online chain partitioning of posets. There will be presented a full characterization of the class of posets, for which the number of colors (chains) used by first-fit is a function of width, i.e. best offline solution. This part will also present two different subexponential online algorithm for the online chain partitioning problem. The last part will concern the incremental matching problem in bipartite graphs. There will be presented an incremental algorithm that maintains the maximum size matching in total time equal the running time of one of the fastest offline maximum matching algorithm that was given by Hopcroft and Karp. Moreover, I will show an analysis of the shortest augmenting path algorithm.

This is joint work with Marcin Anholcer, Jarosław Grytczuk, Sebastian Czerwiński, Paweł Rzążewski, Stefan Felsner, Kolja Knauer, Grzegorz Matecki, Tomasz Krawczyk, H. A. Kierstead, Matthew Smith, Dariusz Leniowski, Piotr Sankowski, Anna Zych-Pawlewicz.

We’ll cover the Turan theorem from 1941, which provides a restriction on the number of edges in a graph that doesn’t contain an induced k-clique, depending on parameter k.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

General schemes relating the computational complex-ity of a video game to the presence of certain common elements or mechan-ics, such as destroyable paths, collectible items, doors opened by keys or activated by buttons or pressure plates, etc. Proofs of complexity of several video games, including Pac-Man, Tron, Lode Runner, Boulder Dash, Deflektor, Mindbender, Pipe Mania, Skweek, Prince of Persia, Lemmings, Doom, Puzzle Bobble 3, and Starcraft.

Giovanni Viglietta. Gaming is a hard job, but someone has to do it! arXiv. 2013.

In 1978 Thomason provided a simple, constructive proof of Smith’s theorem; in particular this proof provides a simple algorithm enables one to find a second Hamiltonian cycle whenever one is given a cubic graph and a Hamiltonian cycle in it. For a couple of years, the runtime of the algorithm remained unknown, with worst known cases being cubic (in the number of vertices), however in 1999 Krawczyk found an example of a graph family, such that Thomason’s algorithm takes time Ω(2^n/8) where is the number of vertices in the input graph from the family.

In this talk, I will present a family of cubic, planar, and 3-connected graphs, such that Thomason’s algorithm takes time Θ(1.1812ⁿ) on the graphs in this family. This scaling is currently the best known.

Let's consider the following game: we have two players (they are called the angel and the devil) and an infinite chessboard. The angel is located in some cell on the board. Players make moves alternatively. The devil chooses any cell that is not occupied by the angle and blocks it. The angel can jump to any other cell which is at distance at most p (p is fixed) from its present location and is not blocked. The devil wins if the angel cannot jump to any other cell. The angel wins if it can avoid being captured forever. We will show that the angel of power 2 has a winning strategy.

András Máthé. The Angel of power 2 wins. Combinatorics, Probability and Computing 16 (2007), no. 3, 363–374.

The presentation will cover the topic of distributed tracing, which is an important issue in the field of distributed systems. Services are nowadays implemented as complex networks of related sub-systems and it is often hard to determine the source of performance problem in such complex structures. We will take a look at Dapper, a large-scale distributed systems tracing infrastructure, and discuss the challenges its designers had to face, as well as the opportunities the tool gives to programmers. We will discuss the core goals of effective instrumentation, analyze the problem of handling huge amount of tracing data and focus on security concerns.

Online maximum matching problem has a recourse of k, when the decision whether to accept an edge to a matching can be changed k times, where k is typically a small constant. First, we consider the model in which arriving edge never disapears. We show that greedy algorithm has competitive ratio of 3/2 for even k and 2 for odd k. Then we show an improvement for typical values of k and proceed to show a lower bound of 1+1/(k-1). Later, we discuss a model where edges can appear and disappear at any time and show generalized algorithms.

Spyros Angelopoulos, Christoph Dürr, and Shendan Jin. Online Maximum Matching with Recourse. arXiv. 2018.

At the seminar were presented some interesting open problems in the field of graph theory.

Praca przedstawia randomizowany algorytm obliczający maksymalny przepływ. Dla sieci przepływowej o n wierzchołkach i m krawędziach, czas wykonania jest O(nm + n²(log n)²) z prawdpodobieństwem co najmniej 1 - 2^-sqrt(nm). Algorytm jest zawsze poprawny i w najgorszym przypadku działa w czasie O(nm log n). Czynnik randomizujący składa się tylko z zastosowania losowych permutacji do list sąsiedztwa wierzchołków na początku algorytmu.

In 1740 Leonhard Euler began to work on counting partitions. It resulted in two fundamental papers in the field. Integer partitions have been an active field of study ever since, tackled by many including Srinivasa Ramanujan, Paul Erdős and Donald Knuth. We present a few beautiful proofs of identities using only basic generating functions and simple bijections.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

A widely investigated subject in combinatorial geometry, originating from Erdős, is the following: given a point set P of cardinality n in the plane, how can we describe the distribution of the determined distances, e.g., determine the maximum number of unit distances, the maximum number of minimum/maximum distances, the minimum number of distinct distances? This has been generalized in many directions by taking point sets in a certain (not necessarily Euclidean) metric space and studying the distribution of certain configurations — and a whole theory emerged.

In this talk I propose the following problem variant: consider planar line arrangements of n lines, and determine the maximum number of unit/maximum/minimum area determined by these lines. We prove that the order of magnitude for the maximum occurrence of unit area lies between n² and n^2+1/4. This result is strongly connected to both additive combinatorial results and Szemerédi-Trotter type results. Next we show a tight bound for the maximum number of minimum area triangles. Finally we discuss a graph theoretic approach for the maximum number of maximum area triangles and present a recursive lower bound.

Joint work with Gábor Damásdi, Leo Martínez-Sandoval and Dániel T. Nagy.

Jan Derbisz, Promotor: dr hab. Tomasz Krawczyk
Wykorzystanie matroidów w algorytmach.

Pola Kyzioł, Promotor: dr hab. Tomasz Krawczyk
Cut & Count technique and its application to NP.-compelete graph problems that require connectivity

Krzysztof Maziarz, Promotor: prof. dr hab. Jacek Tabor
Evolutionary-Neural Hybrid Agents for Architecture Search

Jakub Nowak, Promotor: prof. dr hab. Jacek Tabor
Application of functional image representation

Grzegorz Jurdziński, Promotor: dr Piotr Micek
Głębokie sieci neuronowe w rozpoznawaniu mowy
 

We study the amount of consistency (measured by relational width) needed to solve the CSP parametrized by first-order expansions of countably infinite homogeneous graphs, that are, the structures first-order-definable in a homogeneous graph containing the edge relation E, the relation N that holds between different vertices not connected by an edge and the equality. We study our problem for structures that additionally have bounded strict width, i.e., establishing local consistency of an instances of the CSP not only decides if there is a solution but also ensures that every solution may be obtained from a locally consistent instance by greedily assigning values to variables, without backtracking. It is known that with every countably infinite homogeneous graph G the finite unique minimal set S of finite graphs is associated such that some finite H is an induced substructure of G if and only if there is no H' in S such that H' embeds into H.

Our main result is that structures under consideration have relational width exactly (2,L) where L is the maximal size of a forbidden subgraph in S, but not smaller than 3. It implies, in particular, that the CSP parametrized by such structures may be solved in time O(n^m) where n is the number of variables and m is the maximum of L and the arities of relations in the signature, while strict width l ensures time O(n^l+1). Furthermore, since L may be arbitrarily large, our result contrasts the collapse of the relational bounded width hierarchy for finite structures, in which case, if finite, relational width is always at most (2,3). 

Finally, we show that certain maximally tractable constraint languages with a first-order definition in a countably infinite homogeneous graph whose CSPs are already known to be solvable in polynomial time by other algorithms may be also solved by establishing consistency. Thus, providing an alternative algorithm for already studied problems.

We will introduce a class of graphs called 3CCP, which contains graphs that are 3-connected, cubic (3-regular) and planar. It was shown by Tarjan that finding Hamiltonian cycle in a graph assuming these properties remains NP-complete - we will show the reduction from 3-SAT problem. After that we will present Smith's theorem about parity of number of Hamiltonian cycles containing given edge in cubic graphs and show elegant constructive proof using Thomason's lollipop method. After that we will show a class of graphs for which previous algorithm for finding second Hamiltonian cycle takes exponential number of steps.

The Longest Common Increasing Subsequence problem (LCIS) is a natural variant of the celebrated longest common subsequence (LCS). For LCIS, as well as for LCS, there is an O(n²) algorithm and a SETH-based quadratic lower bound. Both the algorithm and the proof of the bound are, however, quite different for LCIS.

For LCS, there is also the Masek-Paterson O(n²/log n) algorithm. Its technique (the 'four Russians trick') does not seem to work for LCIS in any obvious way, so a natural question arises: does any sub-quadratic algorithm exist for Longest Common Increasing Subsequence problem?

We answer this question positively, presenting a O(n²/log^an) algorithm for some a>0. The algorithm is not based on memorizing small inputs (often used for logarithmic speedups, including LCS), but rather utilizes a new technique, bounding the number of significant symbol matches between the two sequences.

For each cell (i, j) of NxN square there is given a list C(i, j) of N colors. Can we choose a color for each cell in such a way that colors in each row and each column are distinct?

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

Prezentowana przez nas praca przedstawia nowe obserwacje, które pozwoliły autorom dowieść poprawności dwóch znanych algorytmów (Hu-Tuckera i Garsi-Wachs) na konstrukcję optymalnych drzew utrzymujących porządek leksykograficzny. Omówimy uogólnioną wersję algorytmu Garsi-Wachs wraz z przejrzystym i łatwym do zilustrowania dowodem, który pomaga również w zrozumieniu podejścia Hu-Tuckera.

Let G be a graph with maximum degree d. We show a randomized procedure that colors the edges of G so that:

• every two adjacent edges get two different color;
• edges of every cycle get at least three different colors.

Such a coloring is called an acylic edge-coloring of G. The minimum number of colors in an acyclic edge coloring of G is called the acylic index of G. It is conjectured that acylic index of G is at most d+2. We are able to prove that our coloring procedure succeeds for roughly 3.97d colors (improving on a previous result that used 4d colors).

This is joint work with Jakub Kozik and Xuding Zhu.

What do the birthday paradox, the coupon collector problem and shuffling cards have in common? What does it mean for a deck of cards to be "random" or "close to random"? How long does one have to shuffle a deck of cards until it is random? In practical use cases, the question is not about the asymptote - it is about the exact numbers.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

One of the important topics in the information theory of non-sequential random data structures such as trees, sets, and graphs is the question of entropy: how many bits on average are needed to describe the structure. Here we consider dynamic graphs generated by a duplication model in which a new vertex selects an existing vertex and copies all of its neighbors. We provide asymptotic formulas for entopies for both labeled and unlabeled versions of such graphs and construct compression algorithms matching these bounds up to two bits. Moreover, as a side result, we were able to derive asymptotic expansions of expected value of f(X) for functions of polynomial growth, when X has beta-binomial distribution - which in turn allowed to obtain e.g. asymptotic formula the entropy for a Dirichlet-multinomial distribution.

Main aim of the lecture is the answer for Claude Shannon's question from 1956: "Suppose we want to transmit messages across a channel (where some symbols may be distorted) to a receiver. What is the maximum rate of transmission such that the receiver may recover the original message without errors?"

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

Dostając zbiór n dodatnich liczb całkowitych, problem Modular Subset Sum polega na sprawdzeniu czy istnieje podzbiór, który sumuje się do zadanego t modulo dana liczba całkowita m. Jest to naturalne uogólnienie problemu Subset Sum (m=+∞), który silnie łączy się z addytywną kombinatoryką i kryptografią.

Niedawno zostały opracowane efektywne algorytmy dla przypadku niemodularnego, działające w czasie blisko-liniowym pseudo-wielomianowym. Jednak dla przypadku modularnego najlepszy znany algorytm (Koiliaris'a i Xu) działa w czasie Õ(m^5/4).

W tej pracy prezentujemy algorytm działający w czasie Õ(m), który dopasowuje się do warunkowego ograniczenia dolnego opartego na SETH. W przeciwieństwie do większości poprzednich wyników związanych z problemem Subset Sum, nasz algorytm nie korzysta z FFT. Natomiast, jest zdolny zasymulować "podręcznikowe" programowanie dynamiczne znacznie szybciej, używając pomysłów ze Szkicowania Liniowego. Jest to jedna z pierwszych aplikacji technik bazujących na szkicowaniu, by osiągnąć szybki algorytm dla problemów kombinatorycznych w modelu offline.

First, several proofs for the number of labeled trees, each using different approach (bijection, linear algebra, recursion, double counting) will be presented. Second part of the seminar will introduce an interesting graph problem first raised by Victor Klee in 1973. This problem can be represented as placing guards in a museum to guard it properly - that is area of the museum must be completely covered by the field of view of the guards.

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler. Proofs from The Book. Sixth edition. Springer, Berlin, 2018. viii+326 pp. ISBN: 978-3-662-57264-1; 978-3-662-57265-8.

Gunrock is a CUDA library for graph-processing designed specifically for the GPU. It uses a high-level, bulk-synchronous, data-centric abstraction focused on operations on a vertex or edge frontier. Gunrock achieves a balance between performance and expressiveness by coupling high performance GPU computing primitives and optimization strategies with a high-level programming model that allows programmers to quickly develop new graph primitives with small code size and minimal GPU programming knowledge.

Four color theorem was proven in 1976 with extensive computer help. Since then there is interest in finding a simpler proof that uses no computer computation. I will present relation between Four Color Theorem and edge 3-coloring of planar, cubic graphs without bridges, and a new result proving that the existence of approximate coloring (with the fourth color used ‘rarely’) is enough to imply Four Color Theorem.

Atish Das Sarma, Amita S. Gajewar, Richard Lipton, Danupon Nanongkai. An approximate restatement of the four-color theorem. Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications 17(5), pages 567–573, 2013.

A palindrome is a string which reads the same forward as backward, such as `Ada` or `lol`. We will present a data structure which stores information about all the different palindromic substrings of a given string and prove some basic facts about the data structure. We will show that it is useful and discuss some problems which can be solved with it.

Mikhail Rubinchik, Arseny M. Shur. EERTREE: An Efficient Data Structure for Processing Palindromes in Strings. arXiv, pages 1-21, 2015.

Consensus is one of the most important goals to be achieved when many distributed computers share the same task and resources. There are two main families of algorithms solving this problem. Traditional consensus protocols require O(n²) communication, while blockchains rely on proof-of-work. In this talk we will introduce a new family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built on a metastable mechanism. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety and are both quiescent and green. We will analyze some of their properties and guarantees. Finally we will see results of porting Bitcoin transactions to the introduced family of protocols.

Team Rocket. Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies. 2018.

Colorability and choosability of planar graphs have been heavily studied in the past. In 1994 Thomassen proved that every planar graph is 5-choosable using concise induction. Recently Grytczuk and Zhu used similar ideas to prove that for every planar graph G we can find a matching M in it such that G-M is 4-choosable with the help of Combinatorial Nullstellensatz theorem.

Computational approach to the problem of solving equation, began with the question of David Hilbert. He asked, if there exists an algorithm, that decides wheather given Diophantine equation has a solution or not.  Yuri Matiyasevich proved this problem to be undecidable.  An analogy for decidability in finite realms is tractability. During the talk, we introduce the notion of PolSat problem for finite algebras and discuss the results for the wide class of algebraic structures.

Between the well-known concepts of k-colorability and k-choosability (also know as k-list colorability) lies a whole spectrum of more refined notions. This allows for seeing k-colorability and k-choosability under one unified framework. Exploring this, one immediately discovers interesting problems - for example, possible strengthenings of the four color theorem. We will take a look at these notions, prove some of their properties, and leave many conjectures and open problems.

Odległość edycyjna to jeden ze sposobów zmierzenia jak bardzo dwa ciągi znaków są do siebie podobne. Polega on na zliczeniu minimalnej liczby operacji wstawienia, usunięcia lub zmienienia znaku na inny, wymaganej aby przekształcić jedno słowo w drugie. W tej pracy autorzy skupili się na problemie złożoności obliczeniowej aproksymowania odległości edycyjnej pomiędzy parą słów.

Problem wyznaczenia dokładnej odległości edycyjnej może być rozwiązany za pomocą klasycznego algorytmu dynamicznego działającego w kwadratowym czasie. W 2010 roku Andoni, Krauthgamer i Onak przedstawili działający w czasie prawie liniowym, algorytm aproksymujący odległość edycyjną z polilogarytmicznym czynnikiem aproksymacji. W 2014 Backurs i Indyk pokazali, że dokładny algorytm działający w czasie O(n^(2-δ))implikowałby szybki algorytm dla SAT i fałszywość silnej hipotezy o czasie wykładniczym (SETH). Ponadto, ostatnio w 2017, Abboud i Backurs pokazali, że istnienie algorytmu aproksymującego odległość edycyjną w czasie prawdziwie podkwadratowym z czynnikiem aproksymacji 1 + o(1) implikowałoby fałszywość paru hipotez dotyczących złożoności obwodów boolowskich (circuit complexity). To poddaje w wątpliwość aproksymowalność odległości edycyjnej z dokładnością do czynnika stałego w czasie prawdziwie podkwadratowym.

W tej pracy autorzy jednak odpowiedzieli twierdząco na to pytanie, przedstawiając bardzo ciekawy algorytm aproksymujący odległość edycyjną, z stałym czynnikiem aproksymacji i dowodząc, że jego czas działania jest ograniczony od góry przez Õ(n^(2−2/7)).

Jacob Holm, Giuseppe F. Italiano, Adam Karczmarz, Jakub Lacki, Eva Rotenberg, Piotr Sankowski: Contracting a Planar Graph Efficiently. CoRR abs/1706.10228 (2017)

Jakub Łabaj. Contracting a Planar Graph Efficiently. slides. 2018.

We show that every 3-connected graph which contains many disjoint 2xn-grid minors, contains a 2x(n+1)-grid-minor. We use this result in a qualitative structure theorem for graphs without large 2xn grids.

This is a result from a joint paper with Tony Huynh, Gwenaël Joret, Piotr Micek and Paul Wollan

In this talk I will present upper bound for a queue-number of graphs with bounded tree-width obtained by Veit Wiechert. The new upper bound, 2k - 1, improves upon double exponential upper bounds due to Dujmović et al. and Giacomo et al. Additionally I will show his construction of k-trees that have queue-number at least k + 1. The construction solves a problem of Rengarajan and Veni Madhavan, namely, that the maximal queue-number of 2-trees is equal to 3.

Veit Wiechert. On the queue-number of graphs with bounded tree-width. Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 24(1):1-14, 2017.

Marcin Muszalski. Queue-number of graphs with bounded tree-width - Veit Wiechert. slides. 2018.

We give very short and simple proofs of the following statements: Given a 2-colorable 4-uniform hypergraph on n vertices,

1) It is NP-hard to color it with log^delta n colors for some delta>0.

2) It is quasi-NP-hard to color it with O({log^{1-o(1)} n}) colors.

We consider the following metric version of the Cops and Robbers game. Let G be a simple graph and let k≥1 be a fixed integer. In the first round, Cop picks a subset of k vertices B={v₁,v₂,...,v_k} and then Robber picks a vertex u but keeps it in a secret. Then Cop asks Robber for a vector D_u(B)=(d₁,₂,...,d_k) whose components d_i=d_G(u,v_i), i=1,2,...,k, are the distances from u to the vertices of B. In the second round, Robber may stay at the vertex u or move to any neighbouring vertex which is kept in a secret. Then Cop picks another k vertices and asks as before for the corresponding distances to the vertex occupied by Robber. And so on in every next round. The game stops when Cop determines exactly the current position of Robber. In that case, she is the winner. Otherwise, Robber is the winner (that is if Cop is not able to localise him in any finite number of rounds). Let ζ(G) denote the least integer k for which Cop has a winning strategy. Notice that this parameter is well defined since the inequality ζ(G)≤|V(G)| holds obviously. The aim of the talk is to present results concerning 2-trees, outerplanar graphs and planar graphs. This is a joint work with Przemysław Gordinowicz, Jarosław Grytczuk, Nicolas Nisse, Joanna Sokół, and Małgorzata Śleszyńska-Nowak.

Bartłomiej Bosek, Przemysław Gordinowicz, Jarosław Grytczuk, Nicolas Nisse, Joanna Sokół, Małgorzata Śleszyńska-Nowak. Centroidal localization game. arXiv, pages 1-15, 2017.

Bartłomiej Bosek, Przemysław Gordinowicz, Jarosław Grytczuk, Nicolas Nisse, Joanna Sokół, Małgorzata Śleszyńska-Nowak. Localization game on geometric and planar graphs. arXiv, pages 1-15, 2017.

This note is about encoding Turing machines into the lambda -calculus. The encoding we show is interesting for two reasons:

1. Weakly strategy independent : the image of the encoding is a very small fragment of the lambda - calculus, that we call the deterministic lambda -calculus det. Essentially, it is the CPS (continuation-passing style) lambda -calculus restricted to weak evaluation (i.e., not under abstractions). In det every term has at most one redex, and so all weak strategies collapse into a single deterministic evaluation strategy, because there are no choices between redexes to be made. The important consequence of this property is that every weak evaluation strategy then allows to simulate Turing machines,as well as any strong strategy reducing weak head redexes (or even only weak head redexes) first.

2. Linear overhead: the simulation is very efficient, when taking the number of beta-steps as the time cost model for the deterministic lambda -calculus. The simulation in det indeed requires a number of beta-steps that is linear in the number of transitions of the encoded Turing machine, which is the best possible overhead. Therefore, not only all weak strategies simulate Turing
machines, but they all do it efficiently.

In 1981, Kelly showed that planar posets can have arbitrarily large dimension. However, the posets in Kelly's example have bounded Boolean dimension and bounded local dimension, leading naturally to the questions as to whether either Boolean dimension or local dimension is bounded for the class of planar posets. The question for Boolean dimension was first posed by Nešetril and Pudlák in 1989 and remains unanswered today. The concept of local dimension is quite new, introduced in 2016 by Ueckerdt. In just the last year, researchers have obtained many interesting results concerning Boolean dimension and local dimension, contrasting these parameters with the classic Dushnik-Miller concept of dimension, and establishing links between both parameters and structural graph theory, path-width and tree-width in particular. Here we show that local dimension is not bounded on the class of planar posets. Our proof also shows that the local dimension of a poset is not bounded in terms of the maximum local dimension of its blocks, and it provides an alternative proof of the fact that the local dimension of a poset cannot be bounded in terms of the tree-width of its cover graph, independent of its height. This is a joint work with Jarosław Grytczuk and W.T. Trotter.

Bartłomiej Bosek, Jarosław Grytczuk, William T. Trotter. Local Dimension is Unbounded for Planar Posets. arXiv, pages 1-12, 2017.

The class of unit interval graphs has at least 3 equivalent definitions:

• intersection graphs of unit-length intervals,
• intersection graphs of intervals such that no interval properly contains any other interval,
• K_1,3-free chordal graphs.

We ask whether the competitive ratio in the online unit-interval graph coloring with bandwidths depends on the chosen graph representation.

Limited automata are one-tape Turing machines that are allowed to rewrite the content of any tape cell only in the first d visits, for a fixed constant d. In the case d = 1, namely, when a rewriting is possible only during the first visit to a cell, these models have the same power of finite state automata. We prove state upper and lower bounds for the conversion of 1-limited automata into finite state automata. In particular, we prove a double exponential state gap between nondeterministic 1-limited automata and one-way deterministic finite automata. The gap reduces to single exponential in the case of deterministic 1-limited automata. This also implies an exponential state gap between nondeterministic and deterministic 1-limited automata. Another consequence is that 1-limited automata can have less states than equivalent two-way nondeterministic finite automata. We show that this is true even if we restrict to the case of the one-letter input alphabet. For each d \geq 2, d-limited automata are known to characterize the class of context-free languages. Using the Chomsky-Schutzenberger representation for context-free languages,
we present a new conversion from context-free languages into 2-limited automata.

The shortest augmenting path technique is one of the fundamental ideas used in maximum matching and maximum flow algorithms. Since being introduced by Edmonds and Karp in 1972, it has been widely applied in many different settings. Surprisingly, despite this extensive usage, it is still not well understood even in the simplest case: online bipartite matching problem on trees. In this problem a bipartite tree T=(WB, E) is being revealed online, i.e., in each round one vertex from B with its incident edges arrives. It was conjectured by Chaudhuri et. al. that the total length of all shortest augmenting paths found is O(n log n). In this paper we prove a tight O(n log n) upper bound for the total length of shortest augmenting paths for trees improving over O(n log² n) bound. This is a joint work with Dariusz Leniowski, Piotr Sankowski, and Anna Zych-Pawlewicz.

Bartłomiej Bosek, Dariusz Leniowski, Piotr Sankowski, Anna Zych-Pawlewicz. A Tight Bound for Shortest Augmenting Paths on Trees. arXiv, pages 1-22, 2017.

Based on the paper
Induced subgraphs of graphs with large chromatic number. III. Long holes
by Maria Chudnovsky, Alex Scott and Paul Seymour

a proof of a 1985 conjecture of Gyarfas that for all k, ℓ, every graph with sufficiently large chromatic number contains either a clique of cardinality more than k or an induced cycle of length more than ℓ

will be presented.

A coarse description of a set A \subset \omega  is a set D \subset \omega such that the symmetric difference of A and D has asymptotic density 0. We study the extent to which noncomputable information can be effectively recovered from all coarse descriptions of a given set A, especially when A is effectively random in some sense. We show that if A is 1-random and B is computable from every coarse description D of A, then B is K-trivial, which implies that if A is in fact weakly 2-random then B is computable. Our main tool is a kind of compactness theorem for cone-avoiding descriptions, which also allows us to prove the same result for 1- genericity in place of weak 2-randomness. In the other direction, we show that if A \leq_T \emptyset is a 1-random set, then there is a noncomputable c.e. set computable from every coarse description of A, but that not all K-trivial sets are computable from every coarse description of some 1-random set.

The Hadwiger-Nelson problem asks for the minimum number of colors required to color the plane, in such a way, that any two points at distance exactly one are assigned different colors. Albeit its simple definition, no significant progress on the question was made for nearly a century. In the discussed paper, Aubrey D. N. J. de Grey has shown a set of points in the plane, such that 5 colors are necessary to color it properly, thus improving a long-standing lower bound of 4 colors. Interestingly, the smallest such set discovered so far has 1581 vertices.

An F-free coloring is a coloring of a graph such that each color induces an F-free graph. In this talk we consider dynamic F-free coloring which can be interpreted as a game of Presenter and Painter. In each move Presenter presents new vertices along with the edges between them and already known vertices. In the same move Presenter can also discolor arbitrary vertices and request Painter to color some vertices. The problem we consider can be stated as follows: For a given graph G, is there a sequence of moves for which the greedy algorithm uses at least k colors during dynamic F-free coloring of G. We will show that for some classes of graphs this problem is decidable in polynomial time (for fixed F and k) in the case where F is 2-connected or F is path of length 2.

The main aim of the article is to give a simple and conceptual account for the correspondence (originally described by Bodini, Gardy, and Jacquot) between \alpha equivalence classes of closed linear lambda terms and isomorphism classes of rooted trivalent maps on compact oriented surfaces without boundary, as an instance of a more general correspondence between linear lambda terms with a context of free variables and rooted trivalent maps with a boundary of free edges. We begin by recalling a familiar diagrammatic representation for linear lambda terms, while at the same time explaining how such diagrams may be read formally as a notation for endomorphisms of a reflexive object in a symmetric monoidal closed (bi)category. From there, the “easy” direction of the correspondence is a simple forgetful operation which erases annotations on the diagram of a linear lambda term to produce a rooted trivalent map. The other direction views linear lambda terms as complete invariants of their underlying rooted trivalent maps, reconstructing the missing information through a Tutte-style topological recurrence on maps with free edges. As an application in combinatorics, we use this analysis to enumerate bridgeless rooted trivalent maps as linear lambda terms containing no closed proper subterms, and conclude by giving a natural reformulation of the Four Color Theorem as a statement about typing in lambda calculus.

We propose a new, worst-case cubic-time, generalized parsing algorithm for all context-free languages, based on computing the relations between configurations and transitions in a recursive transition network. The algorithm represents such relations using abstract data types, and for their specific (non-canonical) implementations behaves analogously to generalized LL, Left-Corner, or LR. It features a clean mathematical formulation, and can easily be implemented using only immutable data structures.

In the Simply Typed lambda calculus Statman investigates the reducibility relation between types: for types freely generated using \arrow and a single ground type 0, define A \leq B if there exists a lambda definable injection from the closed terms of type A into those of type B. Unexpectedly, the induced partial order is the (linear) well-ordering (of order type) \omega + 4.

In this talk we will consider the ANTS (Ants Nearby Treasure Search) problem: consider n agents (ants), controlled by finite automata (or PDAs) exploring an infinite grid attempting to locate a hidden treasure. The question we want to answer is: how many agents are necessary to accomplish this task in (expected) finite time? Of course, the answer will depend on the way we model this situation. We will consider synchronous as well as asynchronous environment, agents with access to randomness as well as deterministic ones, agents controlled by PDA as well as finite automata and various combinations thereof. In most cases established bounds are tight, however in certain cases there is still ample room for improvement (which some might consider interesting).

I will present article written by Adrian Dumitrescu and Minghui Jiang in which they revisit the following problem (along with its higher dimensional variant):
Given a set S of n points inside an axis-parallel rectangle U in the plane, find a maximum-area axis-parallel sub-rectangle that is contained in U but contains no points of S.
They created first superlinear lower bound for the number of maximum-volume empty boxes amidst n points in R d (d ≥ 3). I would like to present it and show a prove that the number of maximum-area empty rectangles amidst n points in the plane is O(n log(n) 2^α(n) ), where α(n) is the extremely slowly growing inverse of Ackermann’s function. The previous best bound for this problem, O(n^2 ), is due to Naamad, Lee, and Hsu (1984).

In 2008 Klaus Jansen and Roberto Solis-Oba presented a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the square packing problem. Sandy Heydrich and Andreas Wiese base on their work and show a faster approximation (EPTAS) for the same problem. During the seminar both the common parts of the two papers (such as dividing the squares into large and small ones, dividing the rectangle into cells, frames, rows and blocks) and the new ideas (faster large squares guessing and block size guessing) will be presented.

S. Heydrich, A. Wiese, Faster approximation schemes for the two-dimensional knapsack problem, Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 2017, pp. 79-98

The hiring problem has been recently introduced by Broder et al. in last year’s ACM-SIAM Symp. on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2008), as a simple model for decision making under uncertainty. Candidates are interviewed in a sequential fashion, each one endowed with a quality score, and decisions to hire or discard them must be taken on the fly. The goal is to maintain a good rate of hiring while improving the “average” quality of the hired staff. We provide here an alternative formulation of the hiring problem in combinatorial terms. This combinatorial model allows us the systematic use of techniques from combinatorial analysis, e. g., generating functions, to study the problem.

In a paper authors are colouring of (P3∪P2)-free graphs, a super class of 2K2 -free graphs. During lecture I am going to present three discovered upper bounds of the chromatic number of (P3∪P2) -free graphs, and sharper bounds for (P3∪P2 , diamond)-free graphs and for (2K2, diamond)-free graphs. The first part of a talk will contain an explanation of terminology and notation along with problem statements and results. In the second part, I will focus on proving each result in a sequence of claims and proofs.

Solving equations  is one of the oldest and well known mathematical problems which for centuries was the driving force of research in algebra. Let us only mention Galois theory, Gaussian elimination or Diophantine Equations. If we consider  equations over the ring of integers it is the famous 10th Hilbert Problem on Diophantine Equations, which has been shown to be undecidable. In finite realms such a problem is  obviously decidable in nondeterministic polynomial time.

The talk is intended to present the latest achievements in searching structural algebraic conditions a finite algebra A has to satisfy in order to have a polynomial time algorithm that decides if an equation of polynomials over A has a solution. We will also present the results on  the polynomial  equivalence problem in which we ask whether two polynomials over  a finite algebra describe the same function.

This is joint work with Paweł M. Idziak and Piotr Kawałek..

Circle packing problem, where one asks whether a given set of circles can be fit into a unit square, is known to be NP-hard. I will show that when combined area of circles does not exceed ≈0,539, then it is possible to pack them. The given bound is tight in the meaning that for larger combined area an instance impossible to pack can be found. Proof for this theorem is constructive and gives an algorithm, called Split Packing, for finding a solution for instances satisfying the conditions. Moreover it can also serve as a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the problem of finding a smallest square which can fit given circles.

Sebastian Morr, Split Packing: An Algorithm for Packing Circles with Optimal Worst-Case Density, Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 2017, pp. 99-109

Graph G = (V_1 \cup V_2, E) is regular clustered graph (with two communities) if:

• G is connected and not bipartite,
• |V_1| = |V_2|
• V_1 \cap V_2 = \emptyset
• Every vertex has degree d
• Every vertex in V_1 has exactly b neighbours in V_2 and d-b neighbours in V_1,
• Every vertex in V_2 has exactly b neighbours in V_1 and d-b neighbours in V_2.

Becchetti, L., Clementi, A., Natale, E., Pasquale, F., & Trevisan, L. (2017). Find Your Place: Simple Distributed Algorithms for Community Detection. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (pp. 940-959). Philadelphia

A tree-partition of a graph G is a proper partition of its vertex set into "bags", such that identifying the vertices in each bag produces a forest. The width of a tree-partition is the maximum number of vertices in a bag. The tree-partition-width of G is the minimum width of a tree-partition of G. I will prove three theorems presented in the article, showing an upper bound on the tree-partition-width of all graphs, a lower bound for chordal graphs and a lower bound for graphs with tree-width 2.

David R.Wood, On tree-partition-width, European Journal of Combinatorics, Volume 30, Issue 5, July 2009, Pages 1245-1253

For integers k ≥ 1 and n ≥ 2k + 1, the Kneser graph K(n, k) is the graph whose vertices are the k-element subsets of {1, …, n} and whose edges connect pairs of subsets that are disjoint. The Kneser graphs of the form K(2k + 1, k) are also known as the odd graphs. We settle an old problem due to Meredith, Lloyd, and Biggs from the 1970s, proving that for every k ≥ 3, the odd graph K(2k + 1, k) has a Hamilton cycle. Its construction is based on constructing a spanning tree in a suitably defined hypergraph on Dyck words. As a byproduct, it provides an alternative proof of the so-called middle levels theorem, originally proved by Mütze in 2014.

Joint work with Torsten Mütze and Jerri Nummenpalo (arXiv:1711.01636).

Authors show that the perfect matching problem in general graphs is in quasi-NC by presenting a deterministic parallel algorithm which runs in O(log^3 n) time on n^O(log^2 n) processors. The paper extends the framework of Fenner, Gurjar and Thierauf, who proved that finding perfect matching in bipartite graphs is in quasi-NC. I describe their algorithm in the first part of my presentation. In the second part I talk about difficulties that arise in the general case and how they are approached.

Ola Svensson, Jakub Tarnawski, The Matching Problem in General Graphs is in Quasi-NC, FOCS 2017

This article presents an extension of Alon’s Nullstellensatz to functions of multiple zeros at the common zeros of some polynomials. It also includes an introduction to the polynomials of multiple variables and other useful definitions. There are also many corollaries useful for polynomial problem-solving. Possibly the presentation will include some geometrical usage of Nullstellensatze extensions.

Simeon Ball, Oriol Serra, Punctured combinatorial Nullstellensätze, Combinatorica, September 2009, Volume 29, Issue 5, pp 511–522

Let (P,≤) be a finite poset. For distinct elements x, y ∈ P , we define P(x ≺ y) to be the proportion of linear extensions of P in which x comes before y. For 0 ≤ α ≤ 1, we say (x,y) is an α-balanced pair 2 if α ≤ P(x ≺ y) ≤ 1 − α. The 1/3–2/3 Conjecture states that every finite partially ordered set which is not a chain has a 1/3-balanced pair. Proof of above conjecture as well as stronger condition of having a 1/2-balanced pair for certain families of posets will be shown. These include lattices such as the Boolean, set partition, subspace lattices and variety of diagrams.

Emily J. Olson, Bruce E. Sagan, On the 1/3--2/3 Conjecture, Order, 2018

I will talk about nonstandard approaches to some problems for which there is not known polynomial time classical algorithm.  I will start with briefly explaining mechanism used in Shor algorithm, compressed sensing, and the problem with global optimization formulations used in adiabatic
quantum computers. Then show some perspectives on the subset-sum NP complete problem, like geometric, integration and divergence formulations. Then show how Grassmann variables would be useful for the Hamilton cycle problem.  Finally discuss the difficulty of the graph isomorphism problem
on the most problematic cases: strongly regular graphs, geometric perspective on this problem, and some new approach to rotation invariants for this purpose.

Slides: https://tinyurl.com/y74nx2t6

We prove the conjecture of Seymour (1993) that for every apex-forest H1 and outerplanar graph H2 there is an integer p such that every 2-connected graph of pathwidth at least p contains H1 or H2 as a minor.

This is joint work with Tony Huynh, Gwenaël Joret, and David R.Wood.

I will present some new theorems, proofs and open problems concerning about Combinatorial Nullstellensatz and related problems.

Terence Tao. Algebraic combinatorial geometry: the polynomial method in arithmetic combinatorics, incidence combinatorics, and number theory. arXiv:1310.6482 (2014), pp 1-44.

I will talk about nonstandard approaches to some problems for which there is not known polynomial time classical algorithm. I will start with briefly explaining mechanism used in Shor algorithm and the problem with global optimization formulations used in adiabatic quantum computers. Then show some perspectives on the subset-sum NP complete problem, like geometric, integration and divergence formulations. Then show how Grassmann variables would be useful for the Hamilton cycle problem. Finally discuss the difficulty of the graph isomorphism problem on the most problematic cases: strongly regular graphs, and algebraic perspective on this problem.

Jarek Duda. Some unusualapproaches to hard computational problems. slides.

In the online bipartite matching problem with replacements, all the vertices on one side of the bipartition are given, and the vertices on the other side arrive one by one with all their incident edges. The goal is to maintain a maximum matching while minimizing the number of changes (replacements) to the matching. We show that the greedy algorithm that always takes the shortest augmenting path from the newly inserted vertex (denoted the SAP protocol) uses at most amortized O(log²n) replacements per insertion, where n is the total number of vertices inserted. This is the first analysis to achieve a polylogarithmic number of replacements for any replacement strategy, almost matching the Ω(log n) lower bound.

The previous best known strategy achieved amortized O(√n) replacements [Bosek, Leniowski, Sankowski, Zych, FOCS 2014].

Based on the paper:

Online bipartite matching with amortized O(log²n) replacements

Authors study the online vertex cover problem and online matching problem in bipartite graphs and in general graphs. For the case of bipartite graphs their result is optimal water-filling algorithm with competitive ratio 1/(1-1/e) . The main contribution of this paper is a 1.901-competitive algorithm for vertex cover in general graphs which beats the well-known trivial 2-competitive algorithm. The next major result is a primal-dual analysis of given algorithm that implies the dual result of a 0.526-competitive algorithm for online fractional matching in general graphs. On the hardness side authors show that no randomized online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio better than 1.753 and 0.625 for the online fractional vertex cover problem and the online fractional matching problem respectively, even for bipartite graphs.

Yajun Wang, Sam Chiu-wai Wong. Online Vertex Cover and Matching: Beating the Greedy Algorithm. arXiv (2013), pp 1-21.

A Feedback Vertex Set (FVS) is a subset of vertices in a graph such that its removal results in an acyclic graph. The problem of finding a minimal FVS is one of the classic NP-complete problems. However, in some practical cases, we can assume that its size is fairly small. This motivated an intensive study of the parametrized version of this problem, which asks either for FVS of a size at most k or an information that it doesn't exist. There are several deterministic algorithms known which solve this in time O^*(c^k), the best one for now being O^*(3.592^k).

On bipartite graphs, problem of constrained minimum vertex cover (MIN-CVCB) is defined as follows: given a bipartite graph G = (V, E) with vertex bipartition V = U ∪ L and two integers k_u and k_l, decide whether there is a minimum vertex cover in G with at most k_u vertices in U and at most k_l vertices in L. We show how it is related to practical problems. We prove that (MIN-CVCB) is NP-complete. However, there are many parametrized algorithms running in decent time. We describe one of them, whereby linear kernelization method it achieves O(1.26^k_u+k_l +(k_u +k_l)|G|) time.

Jianer Chen, Iyad A.Kanj. Constrained minimum vertex cover in bipartite graphs: complexity and parameterized algorithms. Journal of Computer and System Sciences. Vol. 67, Iss. 4, (2003), pp. 833-847.

In a graph G, let B be the set of vertices covered by every maximum matching in G, and let D = V(G) − B. Further partition B by letting A be the subset consisting of vertices with at least one neighbor outside B, and let C = B − A. The Gallai-Edmonds Decomposition of G is the partition of V(G) into the three sets A, C, D. The Dulmage–Mendelsohn decomposition is a partition of the vertices of a bipartite graph into subsets, with the property that two adjacent vertices belong to the same subset if and only if they are paired with each other in a perfect matching of the graph. It is an extension of the Gallai-Edmonds decomposition.

L. Lovász, M. D. Plummer. Matching theory. North-Holland Mathematics Studies, 121. Annals of Discrete Mathematics, 29. North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam. 1986. pp. xxvii+544. ISBN: 0-444-87916-1. Chapter 4.3.

This paper studies the maximum matching in a graph. It shows a short proof of a Berge-Tutte formula and the Gallai-Endmonds structure theorem. Authors use Hall's theorem to prove it. Deficiency in a graph (def(S), S⊆V(G)) is o(G-S) - |S|, where o(G-S) is the number of odd components in G-S. Berge-Tutte formula says that the maximum size of a matching in an n-vertex graph G is 1/2(n-def(G)), where def(G) = max_S⊆V(G)def(S). Gallai Edmonds has a sharper formulation which gives considerable information about the structure of maximum size matchings.

Douglas B.West. A short proof of the Berge–Tutte Formula and the Gallai–Edmonds Structure Theorem. European Journal of Combinatorics. Vol. 32, Iss. 5, (2011), pp. 674-676.

In convex integer programming, various procedures have been developed to strengthen convex relaxations of sets of integer points.  On the one hand, there exist several general-purpose methods that strengthen relaxations without specific knowledge of the set S of feasible integer points, such as popular linear programming or semi-definite programming hierarchies.  On the other hand, various methods have been designed for obtaining strengthened relaxations for very specific sets S that arise in combinatorial optimization.

We propose a new efficient method that interpolates between these two approaches.  Our procedure strengthens any convex set containing a set of 0/1-points S, by exploiting certain additional information about S.  Namely, the required extra information will be in the form of a Boolean formula defining the target set S.  The strengthened relaxation is obtained by ''feeding'' the convex set into the formula defining S.
As one result, interpreting an iterated application of our procedure as a hierarchy, our findings simplify, improve, and extend previous results by Bienstock and Zuckerberg on covering problems.

This is joint work with Samuel Fiorini and Stefan Weltge.

We say that a class C of graphs admits low rank-width colorings if there exist functions N : N → N and Q: N → N such that for all p ∈ N, every graph G ∈ C can be vertex colored with at most N(p) colors such that the union of any i ≤ p color classes induces a subgraph of rank-width at most Q(i). It turns out that for every graph class C of bounded expansion and every positive integer r, the class {G^r : G ∈ C} of r-th powers of graphs from C, as well as the classes of unit interval graphs and bipartite permutation graphs admit low rank-width colorings. Additionally, every graph class admitting low rank-width colorings is χ-bounded.

O-joung Kwon, Michał Pilipczuk, and Sebastian Siebertz. On Low Rank-Width Colorings. arXiv (2017), pp. 1-17.

We introduce two classes of graphs - graphs with bounded expansion and nowhere dense graphs. These notions are a common generalization of proper minor closed classes, classes of graphs with bounded degree, locally planar graphs, to name just a few classes which are studied extensively in combinatorial and computer science contexts. We also present generalized colouring numbers adm_r(G), col_r(G), and wcol_r(G) and show important applications in the theory of above-mentioned classes of graphs. Finally, we prove that every graph excluding a fixed topological minor admits a universal order, that is, one order witnessing that the colouring numbers are small for every value of r, and show that it can be efficiently computed.

Stephan Kreutzer, Michał Pilipczuk, Roman Rabinovich, and Sebastian Siebertz. The Generalised Colouring Numbers on Classes of Bounded Expansion. In Proceedings of 41st International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2016). Vol. 58 (2016), pp. 85:1-85:13.

• Conditional lower bounds for k-mismatch pattern matching
• Faster algorithms for subset sum
• Complexity of 3-coloring for graphs with excluded k-paths

A vertex coloring of graph G satisfies the majority rule, if for each vertex v at most half of its neighbors receive the same color as v. A coloring which satisfies the majority rule is called majority coloring. We consider its game version. For given graph G and color set C two players, Alice and Bob, in alternating turns color vertices with respect to the majority rule. Alice wins when every vertex becomes colored, while goal for Bob is to create a vertex which cannot be colored with any color belonging to the set C without breaking the majority rule. Let µ_g(G) denote the least number of colors belonging to C for which Alice has winning strategy in game on graph G. We show that if the color set C is finite, there exists a graph G on which Bob has winning strategy. We prove also that for graphs with col(G) = 3 parameter µ_g(G) is still unbounded.

On-line interval coloring was studied by Kierstead and Trotter. They presented an algorithm with competitive ratio 3,and showed a construction which implies that there is no algorithm with competitive ratio strictly less than 3. However, their construction in asymptotic case requires intervals with possibly unbounded length.

We are interested in a variant of the on-line interval coloring problem in which all intervals have lenght between 1 and L. We show that as L tends to infinity the asymptotic competitive ratio tends to 5/2. Moreover we show that for L=1+epsi there is no algorithm with competitive ratio less than 5/3 and for L=2+epsi there is no algotihm with competitive ratio less than 7/4.

Finally, we want to know how the asymptotic competitive ratio changes as a function of L.

Erdős discrepancy problem has waited for the solution for over 70 years until last year Terrence Tao, with a help of Polymath project, has published a paper with its solution. After having our friends given an introduction to the topic and shown the Fourier analytic reduction of the problem last week we will continue presenting the proof. It will include the proof of Elliot-type conjecture and a sketch of how to apply a generalised Borwein-Choi-Coons analysis for the final steps of the main proof.

Terence Tao. The Erdős discrepancy problem. Discrete Analysis. Vol. 2 (2016), pp. 1-20.

The purpose of my talk is to discuss several problems related to coloring and construction of appropriate representation for partially ordered sets (also posets) and graph classes derived from posets. In these problems, we will assume the following two scenarios:

in the first scenario, an algorithm receives a poset element one after another. For each new element added, the algorithm takes an irrevocable decision (assigns a color or extends a current representation) just after this element is presented (algorithms that work under such conditions are called on-line).

in the second scenario, an algorithm receives an incomparability graph of some poset and a representation of some parts of this graph, and its task is to check whether this partial representation can be extended to a representation of the whole graph that is appropriate for the considered class of graphs.

In the context of on-line algorithms, we focus our attention on two problems: partitioning posets into chains, which is a special case of on-line coloring of incomparability graphs, and embedding posets into d-dimentional space R^d.

In the context of extending partial representations problems, we are interested in graph classes whose representations introduce a natural order on vertices of these graphs.

We focus our attention on:

• function graphs that are intersection graphs of continuous functions [0,1] → R,

• permutation graphs that are intersection graphs of linear functions [0,1] → R,

• trapezoid graphs that are intersection graphs of trapezoids spanned between two fixed parallel lines containing the bases of these trapezoids.

Erdős discrepancy problem had remained unresolved for more than 80 years. In 2015 Erdős theorem has been proofed by Terrence Tao. We present first part of his proof where he uses a Fourier-analytic reduction obtained as part of the Polymath5 project which reduces the problem to the case when f is replaced by a (stochastic) completely multiplicative function g.

Terence Tao. The Erdős discrepancy problem. Discrete Analysis. Vol. 2, (2016), pp. 1-20.

We give a simple proof that the RANKING algorithm of Karp, Vazirani and Vazirani is 1-1/e competitive for the online bipartite matching problem. The proof is via a randomized primal-dual argument. Primal-dual algorithms have been successfully used for many online algorithm problems, but the dual constraints are always satisfied deterministically. This is the first instance of a non-trivial randomized primal-dual algorithm in which the dual constraints only hold in expectation.

Nikhil R. Devanur, Kamal Jain, Robert D. Kleinberg. Randomized Primal-Dual analysis of RANKING for Online Bipartite Matching. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 101-107, SIAM, Philadelphia, PA, 2012.

The shortest augmenting path technique is one of the fundamental ideas used in maximum matching and maximum flow algorithms. Since being introduced by Edmonds and Karp in 1972, it has been widely applied in many different settings. Surprisingly, despite this extensive usage, it is still not well understood even in the simplest case: online bipartite matching problem on trees. In this problem a bipartite tree T=(WB, E) is being revealed online, i.e., in each round one vertex from B with its incident edges arrives. It was conjectured by Chaudhuri et. al. that the total length of all shortest augmenting paths found is O(n log n). In this paper we prove a tight O(n log n) upper bound for the total length of shortest augmenting paths for trees improving over O(n log² n) bound.

We examine the classic on-line bipartite matching problem studied by Richard M. Karp, Umesh V. Vazirani, and Vijay V. Vazirani. Algorithm attempts to match online new vertices with edges. Such a decision, once made, is irrevocable. The objective is to maximize the size of the resulting matching. We will see a sketch of simple proof of their result that the Ranking algorithm for this problem achieves a competitive ratio of 1 − 1/e.

B.E. Birnbaum, C. Mathieu. On-line bipartite matching made simple. SIGACT News 39 (1), 80-87, 2008.

We give insight into competitive reachability for outerplanar graphs and also for other classes of graphs with bounded degree. Competitive reachability is a game where two players orient the edges of undirected graph G alternately until all edges of G have been oriented. One player wants to minimize the number of ordered pairs of distinct vertices (x, y) with a directed path from x to y. And the second want to maximize it.

Furthermore we focus on harmonious coloring conjecture for outerplanar graphs and further attempts in this area. A harmonious coloring of a graph G is a proper vertex coloring of G in which every pair of colors appears on adjacent vertices at most once. The harmonious chromatic number, denoted by h(G), is the minimum number of colors in a harmonious coloring. Analogically we define  harmonious edge coloring in which every pair of colors appears on incident edges at most once. The minimal number of color we denote by h'(G). The conjecture states that h(G)<=h'(G).

Finally we tackle the hamiltonian cycles in grid graphs. Grid graph are finite vertex induced subsets of infinite lattice, composed from unit-side squares, equilateral triangles or equilateral hexagons. Decide whether the grid graph has hamiltonian cycle is NP-hard in general.

Short presentantion of the book Logic of Provability by George Boolos.

The recent breakthrough paper by Calude et al. has given the first algorithm for solving parity games in quasipolynomial time, where previously the best algorithms were mildly subexponential. We devise an alternative quasi-polynomial time algorithm based on progress measures, which allows us to reduce the space required from quasi-polynomial to nearly linear. Our key technical tools are a novel concept of ordered tree coding, and a succinct tree coding result that we prove using bounded adaptive multi-counters, both of which are interesting in their own right.

Based on the paper:
Succinct progress measures for solving parity games,
by Marcin Jurdziński and Ranko Lazić

This study arises from the following question: what is the proportion of tautologies of the given length n among the number of all FO relational sentences of length n? We investigate the simplest language with a fixed signature σ = {r}, where r is a binary relation symbol. The model with four logic symbols and an universal quantifier lead us to discover an unexpected result - the fraction of valid sentences is always greater than a fixed constant and therefore the density, if exists, is positive. The main theorem is derived from the analysis of structural properties of FO formulae, which themselves bear strict resemblance to structural properties of λ-terms.

The talk is based on the paper by Ben Adida with the same title [1]. In addition, we recall ElGamal encryption scheme and zero-knwoledge proofs.

Voting with cryptographic auditing, sometimes called open-audit voting, has remained, for the most part, a theoretical endeavor. In spite of dozens of fascinating protocols and recent ground-breaking advances in the field, there exist only a handful of specialized implementations that few people have experienced directly. As a result, the benefits of cryptographically audited elections have remained elusive.

We present Helios, the first web-based, open-audit voting system. Helios is publicly accessible today: anyone can create and run an election, and any willing observer can audit the entire process. Helios is ideal for on-line software communities, local clubs, student government, and other environments where trustworthy, secret-ballot elections are required but coercion is not a serious concern. With Helios, we hope to expose many to the power of open-audit elections.

References

[1] Ben Adida, Helios: Web-based Open-Audit Voting, Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Security Symposium, 2008, pp. 335-348

• Noah Kravitz, Stefan Steinerberger Ulam Sequences and Ulam Sets

We propose a Ramsey theory for binary trees and prove that for every r-coloring of "strong copies" of a small binary tree in a huge complete binary tree T, we can find a strong copy of a large complete binary tree in T with all small copies monochromatic. As an application, we construct a family of graphs which have tree-chromatic number at most 2 while the path-chromatic number is bounded. This construction resolves a problem posed by Seymour.

Joint work with Fidel Barrera-Cruz, Stefan Felsner, Tamás Mészáros, Heather Smith, Libby Taylor, and Tom Trotter.

Motivated by a connection to vertex-distinguishing colorings, we initiate the study of a new graph covering parameters: The k-strong induced arboricity. For a graph G and a positive integer k, a k-strong induced forest F in G is an induced forest in which every component has at least k edges. An edge in G is called k-valid if it is contained in at least one k-strong induced forest. The k-strong induced arboricity f_k(G) is the smallest number m such that all k-valid edges of G can be covered with m k-strong induced forests in G.

We demonstrate that the k-strong induced arboricity is not monotone, neither in k, nor under taking subgraphs or even induced subgraphs. In particular we construct 2-degenerate graphs G with f_k(G)≤ 3 and f_k+1(G) arbitrarily large. Focusing on the supremum f_k(C) of f_k(G) among all graphs G from a given graph class C, we prove that f_k(G) is finite whenever C is of bounded expansion. For the class C of planar graphs we prove that f_k(C) is 8,9 or 10. Moreover we give necessary and sufficient conditions for f₁(C) to be finite in terms of r-shallow minors of graphs in C, a notion recently introduced by Nešetřil and Ossona de Mendez.

This is based on joint work with Maria Axenovich, Philip Dörr, Daniel Gonçalves, and Jonathan Rollin.

We briefly introduce the definition of fully homomorphic encryption and describe the two main problems on which are based latest FHE schemes: The LWE/Ring-LWE and AGCD problems. We discuss their advantages and the relations between them. We present the definition of bootstrapping and investigate the FHE scheme based on the AGCD problem as published in [1].

References

[1] J. H. Cheon, D. Stehlé, Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Integers Revisited, EUROCRYPT'10 Proceedings of the 29th Annual international conference on Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, pp. 24--43.

We prove the following theorem. Given a planar graph G and an integer k, it is possible in polynomial time to randomly sample a subset A of vertices of G with the following properties:

1) A induces a subgraph of G of treewidth O(√k log k), and

2) for every connected subgraph H of G on at most k vertices, the probability that A covers the whole vertex set of H is at least (2^{O(√k log2 k)}n^O(1))⁻¹, where n is the number of vertices of G.

Together with standard dynamic programming techniques for graphs of bounded treewidth, this result gives a versatile technique for obtaining (randomized) subexponential parameterized algorithms for problems on planar graphs, usually with running time bound 2^{O(√k log2 k)}n^O(1). The technique can be applied to problems expressible as searching for a small, connected pattern with a prescribed property in a large host graph; examples of such problems include Directed k-Path, Weighted k-Path, Vertex Cover Local Search, and Subgraph Isomorphism, among others. Up to this point, it was open whether these problems can be solved in subexponential parameterized time on planar graphs, because they are not amenable to the classic technique of bidimensionality. Furthermore, all our results hold in fact on any class of graphs that exclude a fixed apex graph as a minor, in particular on graphs embeddable in any fixed surface. We also provide a similar statement for graph classes of polynomial growth.

In the talk I will first focus on the background and motivation, and then highlight the main ideas of the proof by sketching the proof for the case of graph classes of polynomial growth. Based on joint work with Fedor Fomin, Daniel Lokshtanov, Dániel Marx, Michał Pilipczuk, and Saket Saurabh: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05999 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07778.

The talk is divided into two parts. In the first part we briefly introduce Fully Homomorphic Encryption and a presentation of a classic example described in [1]. In the second part, we bring up a subject of partially homomorphic encrytpion schemes over finite fields, presented in [2].

References:

[1] C. Gentry, Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data, 2008 (pdf)
[2] J. Liu, L. Chen and S. Mesnager, Partially homomorphic encryption schemes over finite fields, 2016 (pdf)

The Longest Common Increasing Subsequence problem is a variant of classic Longest Common Subsequence problem, which can be solved in quadratic time with a simple dynamic programming algorithm. During the talk we will show a reduction from the Orthogonal Vectors problem to the Longest Common Increasing Subsequence problem which proves that the latter cannot be solved in strongly subquadratic time unless the SETH is false.

Simple modifications of the reduction prove that the problem for k sequences cannot be solved in O(n^k-ε) time, that the same lower bounds apply to the Longest Common Weakly Increasing Subsequence, and that the assumption of SETH can be replaced with a weaker statement about satisfiability of non-deterministic branching programs.

A packing polynomial is a polynomial that maps the set N^2 of lattice points with nonnegative coordinates bijectively onto N. Cantor constructed two quadratic packing polynomials, and Fueter and Polya proved analytically that the Cantor polynomials are the only quadratic packing polynomials.
The purpose of this paper is to present a beautiful elementary proof of Vsemirnov of the Fueter-Polya theorem. It is a century-old conjecture that the Cantor polynomials are the only packing polynomials on N^2.

We show that a family of quantum authentication protocols introduced in FOCS 2002 can be used to construct a secure quantum channel and additionally recycle all of the secret key if the message is successfully authenticated, and recycle part of the key if tampering is detected. We give a full security proof that constructs the secure channel given only insecure noisy channels and a shared secret key. We also prove that the number of recycled key bits is optimal for this family of protocols, i.e., there exists an adversarial strategy to obtain all non-recycled bits. Previous works recycled less key and only gave partial security proofs, since they did not consider all possible distinguishers (environments) that may be used to distinguish the real setting from the ideal secure quantum channel and secret key resource.

References:

[1] Christopher Portmann, Quantum Authentication with Key Recycling (pdf)

1. Mihai Patrascu , Mikkel Thorup, Planning for Fast Connectivity Updates, Proceedings of the 48th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, p.263-271, October 21-23, 2007

Distributed cryptographic protocols such as Bitcoin and Ethereum use the block chain to synchronize a global log of events between nodes in their network. Previous research has shown that the mechanics of the block chain and block propagation are constrained: if blocks are created at a high rate compared to their propagation time in the network, many conflicting blocks are created and performance suffers greatly.
Inclusive Block Chain Protocol is a alternative structure consists of a directed acyclic graph of blocks to the chain that allows for operation at much higher rates. It is showed that with this system the advantage of highly connected miners is greatly reduced. On the negative side, attackers that attempt to maliciously reverse transactions can try to use the forgiving nature of the DAG structure to lower the costs of their attacks.

References:
[1] Lewenberg Y., Sompolinsky Y., Zohar A., Inclusive Block Chain Protocols. In: Böhme R., Okamoto T. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8975. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (pdf)

One of the most important sets associated with a poset P is its set of linear extensions, E(P). In this paper, we present an algorithm to generate all of the linear extensions of a poset in constant amortized time; that is, in time O(e(P)), where e(P) = |E(P)|. The fastest previously known algorithm for generating the linear extensions of a poset runs in time O(n*e(P)), where n is the number of elements of the poset. Our algorithm is the first constant amortized time algorithm for generating a ``naturally defined'' class of combinatorial objects for which the corresponding counting problem is #P-complete. Furthermore, we show that linear extensions can be generated in constant amortized time where each extension differs from its predecessor by one or two adjacent transpositions. The algorithm is practical and can be modified to efficiently count linear extensions, and to compute P(x < y), for all pairs x,y, in time O(n^2 + e(P)).

Gara Pruesse, Frank Ruskey. Generating Linear Extensions Fast. SIAM J. Comput. Vol. 23, No. 2 (1994), pp. 373-386.

The talk is based on the paper with the same title by Rosario Gennaro, Craig Gentry and Bryan Parno.

Verifiable Computation enables a computationally weak client to "outsource" the computation of a function F on various inputs x₁, ..., x_k to one or more workers. The workers return the result of the function evaluation, e.g., y_i = F(x_i), as well as a proof that the computation of F was carried out correctly on the given value x_i. The verification of the proof should require substantially less computational effort than computing F(x_i) from scratch.

We present a protocol that allows the worker to return a computationally sound, non-interactive proof that can be verified in O(m) time, where m is the bit-length of the output of F. The protocol requires a one-time pre-processing stage by the client which takes O(|C|) time, where C is the smallest Boolean circuit computing F. Our scheme also provides input and output privacy for the client, meaning that the workers do not learn any information about the values x_i or y_i.

• A Note on Boolean Dimension of Posets, J. Nešetřil, P. Pudlák, Irregularities of Partitions, 137-140, 1989

Rozważany będzie problem istnienia wielomianowej bijekcji, najniższego stopnia, między N^k, a N. Przedstawione będą także problemy otwarte związane z tą tematyką.

Materiały do wystąpienia:

1) Elementarny dowód Twierdzenie Feuter-Polya (jedyny kwadratowy i bijektywny wielomian N^2->N to funkcja cantore'a) https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.08261

2) Praca, w której autorzy pokazują nieistnienie wielomianów 3 i 4 stopnia.  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022314X78900367

3) Praca podobnie tematyczna odnosząca się do problemu istnienia wielomianów bijektywnych z pewnego sektora N^2 w N. (To o czym wspomniałem na koniec, opis tego problemu jest też pod koniec w 1) ). Pod koniec pracy jest opisane 6 problemów otwartych związanych z tą tematyką. https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2538

4) W podobnej tematyce. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022314X78900355
 

We study a class of graphs that have a special geometric representation. By a bar visibility representation of an undirected graph we mean a function that associates with each vertex of a graph a horizontal line segment in such a way, that between segments representing two ends of an edge there is a vertical strip (of visibility). In case of directed graphs, we additionally assume that the visibility is from the bottom to the top, that is the line segment representing the source of the edge is below the one for the target.

Graphs admitting such representations are well understood and can be recognized in linear time, both in the undirected and in the directed case. We work in a more subtle setting, where line segments are already associated with some vertices of a graph, and the question is if this can be extended to a bar visibility representation of an entire graph. We prove some results on complexity of this kind of problems.

This is joint work with Steven Chaplick, Grzegorz Gutowski, Tomasz Krawczyk and Giuseppe Liotta. The manuscript is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00174

Until recently, all the algorithms for computing discrete logarithm had a sub-exponential complexity of type L(1/3), similar to the factorization problem. In this talk we'll discuss a heuristic algorithm that provides quasi-polynomial complexity for discrete logarithm in finite fields of small characteristic and that even for other cases still surpasses the Function Field Sieve method.

References:

[1] R. Barbulescu, P. Gaudry, A. Joux, E. Thomé, A quasi-polynomial algorithm for discrete logarithm in finite fields of small characteristic (pdf)

Rozważamy następujący problem: wierzchołki drzewa ponumerowane są kolejnymi liczbami naturalnymi, a dodatkowo w wierzchołku x leży skrzynka o numerze p(x), przy czym funkcja p jest permutacją zbioru {1,2,..,n}. Rozważamy chodzącego po drzewie robota, który może w danym momencie trzymać tylko jedną skrzynkę, może też podnieść napotkaną skrzynkę upuszczając aktualnie trzymaną. Celem robota jest posortować skrzynki (przenosząc każdą do wierzchołka o odpowiednim numerze), przechodząc po drzewie najkrótszą możliwą ścieżką. Praca D. Grafa podaje algorytm znajdujący taką ścieżkę w czasie O(n²) oraz dowód, że jeśli drzewo zastąpimy grafem planarnym, problem staje się NP-zupełny.

1. Hadwiger's Conjecture
2. Seagull Conjecture
3. Jorgensen's Conjecture
4. Unfriendly partitions
5. and a few more conjectures concerning minors.

In this talk we're going to discuss quantum informatics and its impact on the field of cryptography. We will introduce the basic concepts of quantum computing as well as cryptography based on Quantum Key Distribution scheme, one of the aspects of quantum informatics which already is being used in practice. Then we will present Shor's algorithm for polynomial-time factorization, responsible for the cryptosystems based on the hardness of factorization or discrete logarithm (in abelian groups) being no longer secure against an adversary with access to a quantum computer.

References:

[1] M. Hirvensalo, Quantum Computing (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-09636-9)
[2] F. Benatti, M. Fannes, R. Floreanini, D. Petritis, Quantum Information, Computation and Cryptography (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-11914-9)
[3] D. Deutsc, Lectures on Quantum Computation (http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/videos/)
[4] U. Vazirani, BerkeleyX's Lectures: Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation (https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-quantum-computation-uc-berkeleyx-cs-191x)

W ostatnich latach pojawiają się kolejne, coraz lepsze algorytmy mnożenia macierzy. Każdy z nich jest jednak tylko nieznacznie szybszy od poprzednich, będąc przy tym nierównie trudniejszy w zrozumieniu i analizie. Fakt ten jeszcze bardziej komplikuje otwarte od wielu lat pytanie o złożoność optymalnego algorytmu mnożenia macierzy.

Celem prezentacji jest krótkie omówienie technik używanych do ataków na ten niezwykle ważny i trudny problem. Prezentacja oparta jest na przeglądowym wykładzie François Le Galla (autora ostatnich wyników w tym temacie) z 2014 roku.

1.  
2.  
3. www.openproblemgarden.org/op/rendezvous_on_a_line
4. Improved bounds for the symmetric rendezvous value on the line. Qiaoming Han, Donglei Du, Juan Vera, Luis F. Zuluaga. SODA 2007

Praca Aleksandra Mądrego opisuje nowe podejście do problemu maksymalnego przepływu, z użyciem tzw. przepływów elektrycznych. W tej technice krawędziom przypisywany jest opór, a zadaniem jest zminimalizowanie wydzielonej energii. Dowolną sieć przepływową można zredukować do zadania przepływu elektrycznego, z użyciem pośredniej redukcji poprzez warianty problemu skojarzenia w grafie dwudzielnym. Głównym rezultatem pracy jest algorytm przepływu o złożoności O(m^10/7), na seminarium będzie prezentowana prostsza wersja algorytmu, działająca w O(m^3/2).

• Heawood's empire coloring problem in the plane - 6M colors are sufficient to color a map of empires each consisting of at most M connected regions.
• Earth-Moon map coloring Mathematics Magazine Vol. 66, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 211-226problem - it is known that the chromatic number of thickness-2 graphs is between 9 and 12. It is an open problem to find the exact value.

Second Neighborhood via First Neighborhood in Digraphs. Guantao Chen, Jian Shen, Raphael Yuster. Annals of Combinatorics. June 2003, Volume 7, Issue 1, pp 15–20.

In the talk we present results of Aggarwal and Maurer [1], who showed that a generic ring algorithm for breaking RSA with modulus $N$ can be converted into an algorithm for factoring $N$. The results imply that any attempt at breaking RSA without factoring $N$ will be non-generic and hence will have to manipulate the particular bit-representation of the input modulo $N$. This provides new evidence that breaking RSA may be equivalent to factoring the modulus.

References:

[1] D. Aggarwal, U. Maurer, Breaking RSA Generically is Equivalent to Factoring, EUROCRYPT 2009

I'll briefly introduce the audience to two unrelated areas: book embedding and mechanism design, and walk through some open problems in those areas.
Wikipedia: Book embedding
Wikipedia: Mechanism design

Referowana praca rozstrzyga długo otwarty problem: czy budowanie drzewa Steinera zachłannym algorytmem daje wynik gorszy od optymalnego o stałą multiplikatywną? Autorzy (A. Gupta, A. Kumar) dowodzą, że tak, dla stałej równej 96. Jest to pierwsze znane oszacowanie wyniku algorytmu zachłannego, wcześniej podawane algorytmy aproksymacyjne dla tego problemu oparte były o programowanie liniowe.

 
A typical language translator uses a parser to convert an input string into some internal representation, usually in a form of an AST. The AST is then analyzed and transformed in passes. In the final pass, the AST is converted into the output, be it a machine code or source code of another language.
 
However, if we try to combine different languages, e.g. for a purpose of a multi-domain project, we may have a problem: each language uses different kinds of AST nodes, has different assumptions on the AST structure and features different pass algorithms. Settling for the common ground by limiting the node types, assumptions, and algorithms limits how the languages may reason about their code. Any high-level information is lost in such representation and high-level transformations cannot be defined.
 
Working on the common AST is similar to unstructured programming: AST acts as a global machine state. Any change to the state, e.g. introduced by a new language, may inadvertely affect the behavior of the existing languages. In regular programming we have moved away from unstructured programming towards higher abstraction levels, e.g. through functional programming. If it can be done to regular programming, can it be done to AST and code builders as well?
 
Our solution treats AST nodes not as objects of a fixed type. Instead, it is a function with its body describing entirely the behavior of such node. Even the connection between the nodes is represented internally by the function, in a form of continuations. 
The passes over the AST are replaced by a single invocation of these functions. The node functions may contain code for multiple stages of code analysis. In order to reduce the run time these additional stages are scheduled through dynamic staging.
 
This gives the power of abstraction to code building. Even nodes come from different languages may interact, as long as they understand the passed arguments.
 
This major change on how a code is represented requires changes in how we think about common basic operations during language interpretation:
- how do we link two nodes/functions together?
- how do we create control flow structures?
- how do we perform name lookups, even across different languages?
- how do we optimize the code so that the AST layer dissapears when generating code?
- what language-specific optimizations can be performed and how do we specify them?
 
We will address these questions in the upcoming talk.

1. S. Kreutzer, S. Oum, P. Seymour, D. van der Zypen, D. R. Wood, Majority Colourings of Digraphs, Arxiv.
2. Marcin Anholcer, Bartłomiej Bosek, Jarosław Grytczuk Every digraph is majority 4-choosable, Arixv.

• Online Deadline Scheduling with Machine Augmentation
• Scheduling with Precedence Constraints
• Multiway Cut
• Traveling Repairman Problem

Referowana praca (autorstwa J. Łąckiego i A. Karczmarza) rozważa grafy, w którym krawędzie podlegają zmianom - są dodawane bądź usuwane. Opisany jest efektywny algorytm odpowiadający na pytania o osiągalność (istnienie ścieżki między dwoma wierzchołkami) i dwuspójność (istnienie dwóch rozłącznych ścieżek) na zadanych przedziałach czasowych.

Dolne ograniczenie O(n log n) na problem sortowania obowiązuje tylko, jeśli na sortowanych obiektach nie można wykonać żadnych operacji innych niż porównanie. Jeżeli natomiast sortujemy liczby całkowite, możliwe są szybsze algorytmy - referowana praca Mikkela Thorupa z 1997 opisuje algorytm działający w O (n (log log n)²).

We present a simple zero-knowledge proof of knowledge protocol of which many protocols in the literature are instantiations. These include Schnorr's protocol for proving knowledge of a discrete logarithm, the Fiat-Shamir and Guillou-Quisquater protocols for proving knowledge of a modular root, protocols for proving knowledge of representations (like Okamoto's protocol), protocols for proving equality of secret values, a protocol for proving the correctness of a Diffie-Hellman key, protocols for proving the multiplicative relation of three commitments (as required in secure multi-party computation), and protocols used in credential systems. This shows that a single simple treatment (and proof), at a high level of abstraction, can replace the individual previous treatments. Moreover, one can devise new instantiations of the protocol.

[1] Ueli Maurer, Unifying Zero-knowledge Proofs of Knowledge, Progress in Cryptology – AFRICACRYPT 2009, Vol. 5580 LNCS, pp 272-286

Algorytm Find-Union w najbardziej znanej wersji implementowany jest przez las zbiorów rozłącznych z kompresją ścieżek i łączeniem według rang. Prezentowana praca, autorstwa Goela, Khanny, Larkina i Tarjana, analizuje złożoność w wersji z arbitralnym (losowym) łączeniem drzew.

Cryptosystems like AES or RSA use algorithms which runtime depends on input data or using CPU cache. Basing on this fact an attacker can find secret keys by choosing inputs and carefully measuring time needed for computations. In this talk I will present such attacks and how to prevent them.

References:
[1] Paul C. Kocher, Timing Attacks on Implementations of Diffe-Hellman, RSA, DSS and Other Systems (http://www.cryptography.com/public/pdf/TimingAttacks.pdf)
[2] David Brumley, Dan Boneh, Remote Timing Attacks are Practical (https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/ssl-timing.pdf)
[3] Daniel J. Bernstein, Cache-timing attacks on AES (http://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf)

The talk presents a joint work of Jarosław Grytczuk, Joanna Sokół, Małgorzata Śleszyńska-Nowak. We consider the following metric version of the Cops and Robbers game. Let G be a simple graph and let k≥1 be a fixed integer. In the first round, Cop picks a subset of k vertices B={v₁,v₂,…,v_k} and then Robber picks a vertex u but keeps it in a secret. Then Cop asks Robber for a vector D_u(B)=(d₁,d₂,…,d_k) whose components d_i=d_G(u,v_i), i=1,2,…,k, are the distances from u to the vertices of B. In the second round, Robber may stay at the vertex u or move to any neighbouring vertex which is kept in a secret. Then Cop picks another k vertices and asks as before for the corresponding distances to the vertex occupied by Robber. And so on in every next round. The game stops when Cop determines exactly the current position of Robber. In that case, she is the winner. Otherwise, Robber is the winner (that is if Cop is not able to localize him in any finite number of rounds). Let ζ(G) denote the least integer k for which Cop has a winning strategy. Notice that this parameter is well defined since the inequality ζ(G)≤|V(G)| holds obviously.

Przedstawię wstępną wersję swojego programu badawczego, mającego
na celu umożliwienie dowodzenia własności programów w języku, w
którym są napisane. Zacznę od motywacji, opierającej się o pewne
rozwiązanie zmodyfikowanego dylematu więźnia, w której graczami
są programy mające dostęp do kodu źródłowego drugiego gracza.
Następnie przybliżę obecny stan automatycznego dowodzenia faktów
o programach, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem silnie typowanych
języków funkcyjnych. Na koniec przedstawię dalekosiężne cele i
największe trudności, których należy się spodziewać przy
implementacji efektywnych funkcji dowodzących fakty o programach.

======

main goal is to enable proving properties about programs within
the language they are written in. My motivation is based on a
specific solution to the open-source prisoner's dilemma, where
the players are programs with access to the other player's source
code. After explaining the motivation I will shortly present the
current state of automatic proving of programs' properties, with
emphasis on strongly typed functional languages. Finally, I will
introduce my long term goals and the main challenges one should
expect to face when implementing an effective function for
proving facts about programs.

This article is motivated by the following satisfiability question: pick uniformly at random an and/or Boolean expression of length n, built on a set of k_n Boolean variables. What is the probability that this expression is satisfiable? asymptotically when n tends to infinity? The model of random Boolean expressions developed in the present paper is the model of Boolean Catalan trees, already extensively studied in the literature for a constant sequence. The fundamental breakthrough of this paper is to generalise the previous results for any (reasonable) sequence of integers which enables us, in particular, to solve the above satisfiability question. We also analyse the effect of introducing a natural equivalence relation on the set of Boolean expressions. This new quotient model happens to exhibit a very interesting threshold (or saturation) phenomena.

We study the problem of deleting a minimum cost set of vertices from a
given vertex-weighted graph in such a way that the resulting graph has
no induced path on three vertices. This problem is often called
cluster vertex deletion in the literature and admits a straightforward
3-approximation algorithm since it is a special case of the vertex
cover problem on a 3-uniform hypergraph. Very recently, You, Wang, and
Cao described a 5/2-approximation algorithm for the unweighted version
of the problem. Our main result is a 7/3-approximation algorithm for
arbitrary weights, using the local ratio technique. We further
conjecture that the problem admits a 2-approximation algorithm and
give some support for the conjecture. This is in sharp constrast with
the fact that the similar problem of deleting vertices to eliminate
all triangles in a graph is known to be UGC-hard to approximate to
within a ratio better than 3, as proved by Guruswami and Lee. This is
joint work with Samuel Fiorini and Oliver Schaudt.

We focus on (partial) functions that map input strings to a monoid such as the set of integers with addition and the set of output strings with concatenation. The notion of regularity for such functions has been defined using two-way finite-state transducers, (one-way) cost register automata, and MSO-definable graph transformations. In this paper, we give an algebraic and machine-independent characterization of this class analogous to the definition of regular languages by regular expressions. When the monoid is commutative, we prove that every regular function can be constructed from constant functions using the combinators of choice, split sum, and iterated sum, that are analogs of union, concatenation, and Kleene *, respectively, but enforce unique (or unambiguous) parsing. Our main result is for the general case of non-commutative monoids, which is of particular interest for capturing regular string-to-string transformations for document processing. We prove that the following additional combinators suffice for constructing all regular functions:

(1) the left-additive versions of split sum and iterated sum, which allow transformations such as string reversal;

(2) sum of functions, which allows transformations such as copying of strings; and

(3) function composition, or alternatively, a new concept of chained sum, which allows output values from adjacent blocks to mix.

In general, Hamiltonian Cycle Problem is NP-complete in triangular and square grids. In "Not being(super)thin or solid is hard: A study of grid Hamiltonicity" Arkin et al. claimed HCP for thin triangular grids and thin square grids to be NP-complete as well. However the arguments they gave are incorrect. In fact we show that thin triangular grids as well as thin square grids always have HC. Moreover we show a linear algorithm for finding a HC in such graphs.

Let F \subset S_k be a finite set of permutations and let C_n (F) denote the number of permutations  avoiding the set of patterns F.
The Noonan Zeilberger conjecture states that the sequence Cn(F) is P-recursive. We disprove this conjecture. The proof uses Computability Theory and builds on our earlier work [GP1]. We also give two applications of our approach to complexity of computing C_n(F).

We show that the edges of any triangulation of a closed surface different from the projective plane and the sphere can be oriented such that every vertex has non-zero outdegree divisble by three. This confirms a conjecture of Barát and Thomassen. We will explain why this is a first step towards the generalization of Schynyder woods from the plane to orientable surfaces and what is know
about this problem.

Of all types of positional games, Maker-Breaker games are probably the
most studied. We will survey the topic of Maker-Breaker games played
on random graphs, where positional games on graphs meet some standard
random graph models.
The pace will be gentle, and we will not assume any particular prior
knowledge on either positional games or random graphs.

We consider a deterministic rewrite system for combinatory logic over combinators $S,K,I,B,C,S',B'$, and $C'$.
Terms will be represented by graphs so that reduction of a duplicator will cause the duplicated expression to be "shared" rather than copied. To each normalizing term we assign a weighting which is the number of reduction steps necessary to reduce the expression to normal form. A lambda-expression may be represented by several distinct expressions in combinatory logic, and two combinatory logic expressions are considered equivalent if they represent the same lambda-expression (up to $\beta $-$\eta $-equivalence). The problem of minimizing the number of reduction steps over equivalent combinator expressions (i.e., the problem of finding the "fastest running" combinator representation for a specific lambda-expression) is proved to be NP-complete by reduction from the "Hitting Set" problem.

Slot and van Emde Boas weak invariance thesis states that reasonable machines can simulate each other within a polynomially overhead in time.Is lambda  calculus a reasonable machine? Is there a way to measure the computational complexity of a lambda term? This paper presents the first complete positive answer to this longstanding problem. Moreover, our answer is completely machineindependent and based over a standard notion in the theory of lambda calculus: the length of a leftmost-outermost derivation to normal form is an invariant cost model. Such a theorem cannot be proved by directly relating lambda calculus with Turing machines or random access machines, because of the size explosion problem: there are terms that in a linear number of steps produce an exponentially long output. The first step towards the solution is to shift to a notion of evaluation for which the length and the size of the output are linearly related. This is done by adopting the linear substitution calculus (LSC), a calculus of explicit substitutions modelled after linear logic proof nets and admitting a decomposition of leftmostoutermost
derivations with the desired property. Thus, the LSC is invariant with respect to, say, random access machines. The second step is to show that LSC is invariant with respect to the lambda calculus. The size explosion problem seems to imply that this is not possible:having the same notions of normal form, evaluation in the LSC is exponentially longer than in the lambda calculus. We solve such an impasse by introducing a new form of shared normal form and shared reduction, deemed useful. Useful evaluation avoids those steps that only unshare the output without contributing to bata redexes, i.e. the steps that cause the blow-up in size. The main technical contribution of the paper is indeed the definition of useful reductions and the thorough analysis of their properties.

We study the maximum guaranteed size of a dimension two subposet of an n-element poset. A trivial lower bound of the order of n^{1/2} follows from the Dilworth's theorem. We show an upper bound of the order of n^{2/3} improving the n^{0.8295} result by Reiniger and Yeager. We also discuss promising methods for achieving a better lower bound.

Turner's bracket abstraction algorithm is perhaps the most well-known improvement on simple bracket abstraction algorithms. It is also one of the most studied bracket abstraction algorithms. The definition of the algorithm in Turner's original paper is slightly ambiguous
and it has been subject to different interpretations. It has been erroneously claimed in some papers that certain formulations of Turner's algorithm are equivalent. In this note we clarify the relationship between various presentations of Turner's algorithm and we show that some of them are in fact equivalent for translating lambda-terms in beta-normal form.

Modify the Blum-Shub-Smale model of computation replacing the permitted computational primitives (the real field operations) with any finite set B of real functions semialgebraic over the rationals. Consider the class of Boolean decision problems that can be solved
in polynomial time in the new model by machines with no machine constants. How does this class depend on B? We prove that it
is always contained in the class obtained for B = {+, - , x}. Moreover, if B is a set of continuous semialgebraic functions containing + and -, and such that arbitrarily small numbers can be computed using B, then we have the following dichotomy: either our class is P or it coincides with the class obtained for B = {+ , - x} .

Modern SAT solvers have experienced a remarkable progress on solving industrial instances. Most of the techniques have been developed
after an intensive experimental testing process. Recently, there have been some attempts to analyze the structure of these formulas in terms of complex networks, with the long-term aim of explaining the success of these SAT solving techniques, and possibly improving them. We study the fractal dimension of SAT formulas, and show that most industrial families of formulas are self-similar, with a small fractal dimension. We also show that this dimension is not affected by the addition of learnt clauses. We explore how the dimension of a formula, together with other graph properties can be used to characterize SAT instances. Finally, we give empirical evidence that these graph properties can be used in state-of-the-art portfolios.

We present a solution to problem arising in public transport routing systems:
How to efficiently obtain several diverse transit routes given a single-shortest-path solver together with graph representation of transport network.
The input contains desired number of results, not departure time range length which may be unknown even roughly.
We assume optimisation of both travel time and amount of penalties.

Based on public transport routing engine developed (2012-2013) in Teroplan S.A. (e-podróżnik.pl)

BCK-lambda-terms are the I-terms in which each variable occurs at most once. The principal type of a lambda-term is the most general type of the term. In this paper we prove that if two BCK-lambda-terms in beta-normal form have the same principal type then they are identical. This solves the following problem (Y. Komori, 1987) in more general form: if two closed beta eta-normal form BCK-lambda-terms are assigned to the same minimal BCK-formula, are they identical? A minimal BCK-formula is the most general formula among BCK-provable formulas with respect to substitutions for type variables. To analyze type assignment, the notion of "connection" is introduced. A connection is a series of occurrences of a type. in a type assignment figure. Connected occurrences of a type have the same
meaning. The occurrences of the type in distinct connection classes can be rewritten separately; as a result, we have more general type assignment. By "formulae-as-types" correspondence, the result implies the uniqueness of the normal proof
figure for principal BCK-formulas. The result is valid for BCI-logic or implicational fragment of
linear logic as well.

Solving linear systems of equations is a necessary step in numerical methods such as the Finite Element Method and Finite Difference Method. A variety of algorithms has been developed over the years including direct and indirect methods. In this work I want to present an direct multifrontal solver algorithm for special cases of systems coming from  h-adaptive two and three dimensional meshes. The solver algorithm is expressed through graph grammar productions and takes the advantage of advanced parallelization platform Galois.

based on the paper:

Damian Goika, Konrad Jopeka, Maciej Paszyńskia, Andrew Lenhartha, Donald Nguyenb and Keshav Pingalib,
Graph Grammar based Multi-thread Multi-frontal Direct Solver with Galois Scheduler,
doi:10.1016/j.procs.2014.05.086

The talk is about the parallel approach to the standard translation between Lambda Calculus and Combinatory Logic. Let L be a lambda-term and C be a combinator produced from L by the standard translation. Each lambda abstraction occurring in L, causes the linear expansion of some paths in the tree of the C combinator. We will show that the tree expansion can be performed parallel in logarithmic time on the path length. We will also discuss whether this procedure can be performed in the constant time.

Wyniki własne

We prove that the problem of determining the minimum propositional proof length is NP-hard to approximate within a factor of 2^log^{1-o(1)} n. These results are very robust in that they hold for almost all natural proof systems, including: Frege systems, extended Frege systems, resolution, Horn resolution, the polynomial calculus, the sequent calculus, the cut-free sequent calculus, as well as the polynomial calculus. Our hardness of approximation results usually apply to proof length measured either by number of symbols or by number of inferences, for tree-like or dag-like proofs. We introduce the Monotone Minimum (Circuit) Satisfying Assignment problem and reduce it to the problems of approximation of the length of proofs.

Motivated by quite recent research involving the relationship between the dimension of a poset and graph theoretic properties of its cover graph, we show that for every $d\ge 1$, if $P$ is a poset and the dimension of a subposet $B$ of $P$ is at most~$d$ whenever the cover graph of $B$ is a block of the cover graph of $P$, then the dimension of $P$ is at most $d+2$.  We also construct examples which show that this inequality is best possible.
We consider the proof of the upper bound to be fairly elegant and relatively compact.  However, we know of no simple proof for the lower bound, and our argument requires a powerful tool known as the Product Ramsey Theorem.  As a consequence, our constructions involve posets of enormous size.

This is joint work with Bartosz Walczak and Ruidong Wang.

We present several families of total boolean functions which have exact quantum query complexity which is a constant multiple (between 1/2 and 2/3) of their classical query complexity, and show that optimal quantum algorithms for these functions cannot be obtained by simply computing parities of pairs of bits. We also characterise the model of nonadaptive exact quantum query complexity in terms
of coding theory and completely characterise the query complexity of symmetric boolean functions in this context. These results were originally inspired by numerically solving the semidefinite programs characterising quantum query complexity for small problem sizes.

Based on the paper:

On Exact Quantum Query Complexity, by Ashley Montanaro, Richard Jozsa and Graeme Mitchison

We investigate the behavior of data structures when the input and operations
are generated by an event graph. This model is inspired by Markov chains.
We are given a fixed graph G, whose nodes are annotated with operations of the type insert, delete, and query. The algorithm responds to the requests as it encounters them during a (random or adversarial) walk in G. We study the limit behavior of such a walk and give an efficient algorithm for recognizing which structures can be generated. We also give a near-optimal algorithm for successor searching if the event graph is a cycle and the walk is adversarial. For a random walk, the algorithm becomes optimal.

Based on the paper:

Data Structures on Event Graphs, by Bernard Chazelle and Wolfgang Mulzer

I present an O(n^2*log n)-time algorithm that finds a maximum matching in a regular graph with n vertices. More generally, the algorithm runs in O(r*n^2*log n) time if the difference between the maximum degree and the minimum degree is less than r.

R. Yuster, Maximum matching in regular and almost regular graphs

We survey the best known lower bounds on symbols and lines in Frege and extended Frege proofs. We prove that in minimum length sequent calculus proofs, no formula is generated twice or used twice on any single branch of the proof. We prove that the number of distinct subformulas in a minimum length Frege proof is linearly  bounded by the number of lines. Depth d Frege proofs of m lines can be transformed into depth d proofs of O(m^{d+1}) symbols. We show that renaming Frege proof systems are p-equivalent to extended Frege systems. Some open problems in propositional proof length and in logical flow graphs are discussed.

In this paper we consider the well-studied problem of finding a perfect matching in a d-regular bi-partite graph on 2n nodes with m=nd edges. The best-known algorithm for general bipartite graphs (due to Hopcroft and Karp) takes time O(m*sqrt(n)). In regular bipartite graphs, however, a matching is known to be computable in O(m) time (due to Cole, Ost and Schirra). In a recent line of work by Goel, Kapralov and Khanna the O(m) time algorithm was improved first to O'(min(m, n^2.5/d)) and then to O'(min(m,n^2/d)). It was also shown that the latter algorithm is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors among all algorithms that use non-adaptive uniform sampling to reduce the size of the graph as a first step.
In this paper, we give a randomized algorithm that finds a perfect matching in a d-regular graph and runs in O(n log n) time (both in expectation and with high probability). The algorithm performs an appropriately truncated random walk on a modified graph to successively find augmenting paths. Our algorithm may be viewed as using adaptive uniform sampling, an d is thus able to bypass the limitations of (non-adaptive) uniform sampling established in earlier work. We also show that randomization is crucial for obtaining o(nd) time algorithms by establishing an Ω(nd) lower bound for any deterministic algorithm. Our techniques also give an algorithm that successively finds a matching in the support of a doubly stochastic matrix in expected time O(n log2 n) time, with O(m) pre-processing time; this gives a simple O(m + mn log2 n) time algorithm for finding the Birkhoff-von Neumann decomposition of a doubly stochastic matrix.

A. Goel and M. Kapralov and S. Khanna, Perfect matchings in O n log n time in regular bipartite graphs

A rooted planar map is a connected graph embedded in the plane, with one edge marked and assigned an orientation. A term of the pure lambda calculus is said to be \beta normal if it is fully reduced, and planar if it uses all of its variables exactly once and in last-in, first-out order. We exhibit a bijection between rooted planar maps and normal planar lambda terms (with one free variable), by explaining how Tutte decomposition of rooted planar maps (into vertex maps, maps with an isthmic root, and maps with a non-isthmic root) may be naturally replayed in lambda calculus.

We examine the problem of determining a spanning tree of a given graph
such that the number of internal nodes is maximum. The best approximation algorithm known so far for this problem is due to Prieto and Sloper and has a ratio of 2. For graphs without pendant nodes, Salamon has lowered this factor to 7/4 by means of local search. However, the approximative behaviour of his algorithm on general graphs has remained open. In this paper we show that a simplified and faster version of Salamon's algorithm yields a 5/3-approximation even on general graphs. In addition to this, we investigate a node weighted variant of the problem for which Salamon achieved a ratio of 2·Δ(G)−3. Extending Salamon's approach we obtain a factor of 3+epsi for any epsi>0. We complement our results with worst case instances showing that our analyses are tight.

Based on the paper:

Better Approximation Algorithms for the Maximum Internal Spanning Tree Problem, by Martin Knauer and Joachim Spoerhase

Fix a finite set S \suset GL(k, Z). Denote by a_n the number of products of matrices in S of length n that are equal to 1. We show that the sequence a_n is not always P-recursive. This answers a question of Kontsevich.

Extending the results presented on the preceding seminar, we study a dual version of online edge coloring, where the goal is to color as many edges as possible using only a given number, k, of available colors. All of our results are with regard to competitive analysis. For paths, we consider k=2, and for trees, we consider any k>=2. We prove that a natural greedy algorithm called First-Fit is optimal among deterministic algorithms on paths as well as trees. This is the first time that an optimal algorithm for online dual edge coloring has been identified for a class of graphs. For paths, we give a randomized algorithm, which is optimal and better than the best possible deterministic algorithm. Again, it is the first time that this has been done for a class of graphs. For trees, we also show that even randomized algorithms cannot be much better than First-Fit.

L. M. Favrholdt, J. W. Mikkelsen, Online Dual Edge Coloring of Paths and Trees

A new approach to the minimum-cost integral flow problem for small values of the flow is presented. It reduces the problem to the tests of simple multivariate polynomials over a finite field of characteristic two for non-identity with zero. In effect, we show that a minimum-cost flow of value k in a network with n vertices, a sink and a source, integral edge capacities and positive integral edge costs polynomially bounded in n can be found by a randomized PRAM, with errors of exponentially small probability in n, running in O(k log(kn) + log²(kn)) time and using 2^k(kn)^O(1) processors. Thus, in particular, for the minimum-cost flow of value O(log n), we obtain an RNC² algorithm, improving upon time complexity of earlier NC and RNC algorithms.

Based on the paper:

A Fast Parallel Algorithm for Minimum-Cost Small Integral Flows, by Andrzej Lingas and Mia Persson

This paper describes a novel probabilistic approach for generating natural language sentences from their underlying semantics in the form of typed lambda calculus. The approach is built on top of a novel reduction based weighted synchronous context free grammar formalism, which facilitates the transformation process from typed lambda calculus into natural language sentences. Sentences can then be generated based on such grammar rules with a log linear model. To acquire such grammar rules automatically in an unsupervised manner, we also propose a novel approach with a generative model, which maps from subexpressions of logical forms to word sequences in natural language sentences. Experiments on benchmark datasets for both English and Chinese generation tasks yield significant improvements over results obtained by two state of the art machine translation models, in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluation.

We investigate a variant of on-line edge-coloring in which there is a fixed number of colors available and the aim is to color as many edges as possible. We prove upper and lower bounds on the performance of different classes of algorithms for the problem. Moreover, we determine the performance of two specific algorithms, First-Fit and Next-Fit. Specifically, algorithms that never reject edges that they are able to color are called fair algorithms. We consider the four combinations of fair/not fair and deterministic/randomized. We show that the competitive ratio of deterministic fair algorithms can vary only between approximately 0.4641 and 1/2 , and that Next-Fit is worst possible among fair algorithms. Moreover, we show that no algorithm is better than 4/7 -competitive. If the graphs are all k-colorable, any fair algorithm is at least 1/2 -competitive. Again, this performance is matched by Next-Fit while the competitive ratio for First-Fit is shown to be k/(2k - 1), which is significantly better, as long as k is not too large.

M. Favrholdt, N. Nielsen, On-Line Edge-Coloring with a Fixed Number of Colors, Algorithimca 35 (2), 176-191, 2003

We introduce a simple translation from \lambda-calculus to combinatory logic (CL) such that: A is an SN \lambda-term iff the translation result of A is an SN term of CL (the reductions are \beta-reduction in \lambda-calculus and weak reduction in CL). None of the conventional translations from \lambda-calculus to CL satisfy the above property. Our translation provides a simpler SN proof of Godel's \lambda-calculus by the ordinal number assignment method. By using our translation, we construct a homomorphism from a conditionally partial combinatory algebra which arises over SN \lambda-terms to a partial combinatory algebra which arises over SN CL-terms.

We consider the number of linear extensions of an N-free order P. We give upper and lower bounds on this number in terms of parameters of the corresponding arc diagram. We propose a dynamic programming algorithm to calculate the number. The algorithm is polynomial if a new parameter called activity is bounded by a constant. The activity can be bounded in terms of parameters of the arc diagram.

Stefan Felsner , Thibault Manneville, Linear Extensions of N-free Orders, Order 32 (2), 147-155, 2015

We introduce a simple translation from \lambda-calculus to combinatory logic (CL) such that: A is an SN \lambda-term iff the translation result of A is an SN term of CL (the reductions are \beta-reduction in \lambda-calculus and weak reduction in CL). None of the conventional translations from \lambda-calculus to CL satisfy the above property. Our translation provides a simpler SN proof of Godel's \lambda-calculus by the ordinal number assignment method. By using our translation, we construct a homomorphism from a conditionally partial combinatory algebra which arises over SN \lambda-terms to a partial combinatory algebra which arises over SN CL-terms.

We prove that given a bipartite graph G with vertex set V and an integer k,
deciding whether there exists a subset of V of size at most k hitting all maximal independent sets of G is complete for the class Σ^p₂

Based on the paper:

Hitting All Maximal Independent Sets of a Bipartite, by Jean Cardinal and Gwenaël Joret

We present a Counting Algorithm that computes the number of lambda-terms in \beta-normal form that have a given type as a principal type and produces a list of these terms. The design of the algorithm follows the lines of Ben-Yelles algorithm for counting normal (not neessarily principal) inhabitants of a type.

When designing a preemptive online algorithm for the maximum matching problem, we wish to maintain a valid matching M while edges of the underlying graph are presented one after the other. When presented with an edge e, the algorithm should decide whether to augment the matching M by adding e (in which case e may be removed later on) or to keep M in its current form without adding e (in which case e is lost for good). The objective is to eventually hold a matching M with maximum weight.  The main contribution of this paper is to establish new lower and upper bounds on the competitive ratio achievable by preemptive online algorithms.

L. Epstein, A. Levin, D. Segev, O. Weimann, Online Preemptive Matching, arXiv 2012

Card-based protocols that are based on a deck of physical cards achieve secure multi-party computation with information-theoretic secrecy. Using existing AND, XOR, NOT, and copy protocols, one can naively construct a secure computation protocol for any given (multivariable) Boolean function as long as there are plenty of additional cards. However, an explicit sufficient number of cards for computing any function has not been revealed thus far. In this paper, we propose a general approach to constructing an efficient protocol so that six additional cards are sufficient for any function to be securely computed. Further, we prove that two additional cards are sufficient for any symmetric function.