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The HOMFLY-PT Polynomial is Fixed-Parameter Tractable

Author Benjamin A. Burton

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Benjamin A. Burton

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Benjamin A. Burton. The HOMFLY-PT Polynomial is Fixed-Parameter Tractable. In 34th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 99, pp. 18:1-18:14, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.18

Abstract

Many polynomial invariants of knots and links, including the Jones and HOMFLY-PT polynomials, are widely used in practice but #P-hard to compute. It was shown by Makowsky in 2001 that computing the Jones polynomial is fixed-parameter tractable in the treewidth of the link diagram, but the parameterised complexity of the more powerful HOMFLY-PT polynomial remained an open problem. Here we show that computing HOMFLY-PT is fixed-parameter tractable in the treewidth, and we give the first sub-exponential time algorithm to compute it for arbitrary links.
Keywords
  • Knot theory
  • knot invariants
  • parameterised complexity

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