Computing graph gonality is hard

Journal Article (2020)
Author(s)

DC Gijswijt (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Harry J. Smit (Universiteit Utrecht)

Marieke van der Wegen (Universiteit Utrecht)

Research Group
Discrete Mathematics and Optimization
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dam.2020.08.013 Final published version
More Info
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Publication Year
2020
Language
English
Research Group
Discrete Mathematics and Optimization
Journal title
Discrete Applied Mathematics
Volume number
287
Pages (from-to)
134-149
Downloads counter
277
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Institutional Repository
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Abstract

There are several notions of gonality for graphs. The divisorial gonality dgon(G) of a graph G is the smallest degree of a divisor of positive rank in the sense of Baker-Norine. The stable gonality sgon(G) of a graph G is the minimum degree of a finite harmonic morphism from a refinement of G to a tree, as defined by Cornelissen, Kato and Kool. We show that computing dgon(G) and sgon(G) are NP-hard by a reduction from the maximum independent set problem and the vertex cover problem, respectively. Both constructions show that computing gonality is moreover APX-hard.