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Hardness of Finding Kings and Strong Kings

Authors Ziad Ismaili Alaoui , Nikhil Mande

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Problems, reductions and completeness
  • Theory of computation → Oracles and decision trees
  • Mathematics of computing → Combinatorics
Keywords
  • Tournaments
  • kings
  • query complexity

Metrics

Abstract

A king in a directed graph is a vertex v such that every other vertex is reachable from v via a path of length at most 2. It is well known that every tournament (a complete graph where each edge has a direction) has at least one king. Our contributions in this work are:  
- We show that the query complexity of determining existence of a king in arbitrary n-vertex digraphs is Θ(n²). This is in stark contrast to the case where the input is a tournament, where Shen, Sheng, and Wu [SICOMP'03] showed that a king can be found in O(n^{3/2}) queries. 
- In an attempt to increase the "fairness" in the definition of tournament winners, Ho and Chang [IPL'03] defined a strong king to be a king k such that, for every v that dominates k, the number of length-2 paths from k to v is strictly larger than the number of length-2 paths from v to k. We show that the query complexity of finding a strong king in a tournament is Θ(n²). This answers a question of Biswas, Jayapaul, Raman, and Satti [DAM'22] in the negative.  A key component in our proofs is the design of specific tournaments where every vertex is a king, and analyzing certain properties of these tournaments. We feel these constructions and properties are independently interesting and may lead to more interesting results about tournament solutions.

Cite As Get BibTex

Ziad Ismaili Alaoui and Nikhil Mande. Hardness of Finding Kings and Strong Kings. In 45th IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 360, pp. 36:1-36:12, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2025.36

Author Details

Ziad Ismaili Alaoui
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK
Nikhil Mande
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK

References

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