KAIST Discrete Math Seminar

Inspired by the famous virtual Haken conjecture in 3–manifold theory, Gromov asked whether every one-ended word-hyperbolic group contains a surface group. One simple, but still captivating case, is when the word-hyperbolic group is given as the double of a free group with a cyclic edge group. In the first part of the talk, I will describe the polygonality of a word in a free group, and a relation between polygonality and Gromov’s question. Polygonality is a combinatorial property, which is very much like solving a “topological jigsaw puzzle”. In the second part, I will describe a reduction to a purely (finite) graph theoretic conjecture using the Whitehead graph. Part I is a joint word with Henry Wilton (Caltech).

We consider the problem Max-r-SAT, an extensively studied variant of the classic satisfiability problem. Given an instance of CNF (Conjunctive normal form) in which each clause consists of exactly r literals, we seek to find a satisfying truth assignment that maximizes the number of satisfied clauses. Even when r=2, the problem is intractable unless P=NP. Hence the next quest is how close we can get to optimality with moderate usage of computation time/space.

We present an algorithm that decides, for every fixed r≥2 in time O(m) + 2^O(k2) whether a given set of m clauses of size r admits a truth assignment that satisfies at least ((2^r-1)m+k)/2^r clauses. Our algorithm is based on a polynomial-time preprocessing procedure that reduces a problem instance to an equivalent algebraically represented problem with O(k²) variables. Moreover, by combining another probabilistic argument with tools from graph matching theory and signed graphs, we show that an instance of Max-2-Sat either is a YES-instance or can be transformed into an equivalent instance of size at most 3k.

This is a joint work with Noga Alon, Gregory Gutin, Stefan Szeider, and Anders Yeo.