Sofia Brenner

Julia Baligacs, Sofia Brenner, Annette Lutz et al.

We initiate the study of Hamiltonian cycles up to symmetries of the underlying graph. Our focus lies on the extremal case of Hamiltonian-transitive graphs, i.e., Hamiltonian graphs where, for every pair of Hamiltonian cycles, there is a graph automorphism mapping one cycle to the other. This generalizes the extensively studied uniquely Hamiltonian graphs. In this paper, we show that Cayley graphs of abelian groups are not Hamiltonian-transitive (under some mild conditions and some non-surprising exceptions), i.e., they contain at least two structurally different Hamiltonian cycles. To show this, we reduce Hamiltonian-transitivity to properties of the prime factors of a Cartesian product decomposition, which we believe is interesting in its own right. We complement our results by constructing infinite families of regular Hamiltonian-transitive graphs and take a look at the opposite extremal case by constructing a family with many different Hamiltonian cycles up to symmetry.

Markus Anders, Sofia Brenner, Gaurav Rattan

Symmetry breaking is a widely popular approach to enhance solvers in constraint programming, such as those for SAT or MIP. Symmetry breaking predicates (SBPs) typically impose an order on variables and single out the lexicographic leader (lex-leader) in each orbit of assignments. Although it is NP-hard to find complete lex-leader SBPs, incomplete lex-leader SBPs are widely used in practice. In this paper, we investigate the complexity of computing complete SBPs, lex-leader or otherwise, for SAT. Our main result proves a natural barrier for efficiently computing SBPs: efficient certification of graph non-isomorphism. Our results explain the difficulty of obtaining short SBPs for important CP problems, such as matrix-models with row-column symmetries and graph generation problems. Our results hold even when SBPs are allowed to introduce additional variables. We show polynomial upper bounds for breaking certain symmetry groups, namely automorphism groups of trees and wreath products of groups with efficient SBPs.

Sofia Brenner, Jiří Fink

We present an algorithm that enumerates all ideals of an input poset with constant delay in Gray code order, i.e., such that consecutively visited ideals differ in at most three elements. This answers a long-standing open problem posed by Pruesse and Ruskey, and improves upon previous algorithms by Pruesse and Ruskey, Squire, Habib, Medina, Nourine and Steiner, as well as Abdo. Using the same techniques, we also obtain an algorithm that enumerates all antichains of an input poset with constant delay such that successively visited antichains differ in at most three elements. As a key technical ingredient, we introduce a new potential-based analysis framework for recursive algorithms, which we call the Pyramid method. We show that this method subsumes the Push-out method of Uno. Beyond the present application, the Pyramid method is a general framework to analyze recursive algorithms and may thus be of independent interest.