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Graph Colouring is Hard for Algorithms Based on Hilbert's Nullstellensatz and Gröbner Bases

Authors Massimo Lauria, Jakob Nordström

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Keywords
  • proof complexity
  • Nullstellensatz
  • Gröbner basis
  • polynomial calculus
  • cutting planes
  • colouring

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Abstract

We consider the graph k-colouring problem encoded as a set of polynomial equations in the standard way. We prove that there are bounded-degree graphs that do not have legal k-colourings but for which the polynomial calculus proof system defined in [Clegg et al. '96, Alekhnovich et al. '02] requires linear degree, and hence exponential size, to establish this fact. This implies a linear degree lower bound for any algorithms based on Gröbner bases solving graph k-colouring} using this encoding. The same bound applies also for the algorithm studied in a sequence of papers [De Loera et al. '08, '09, '11, '15] based on Hilbert's Nullstellensatz proofs for a slightly different encoding, thus resolving an open problem mentioned, e.g., in [De Loera et al. '09] and [Li et al. '16]. We obtain our results by combining the polynomial calculus degree lower bound for functional pigeonhole principle (FPHP) formulas over bounded-degree bipartite graphs in [Miksa and Nordström '15] with a reduction from FPHP to k-colouring derivable by polynomial calculus in constant degree.

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Massimo Lauria and Jakob Nordström. Graph Colouring is Hard for Algorithms Based on Hilbert's Nullstellensatz and Gröbner Bases. In 32nd Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 79, pp. 2:1-2:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2017.2

Author Details

Massimo Lauria
Jakob Nordström

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