An FPT Algorithm for Splitting a Necklace Among Two Thieves

Abstract

It is well-known that the 2-Thief-Necklace-Splitting problem reduces to the discrete Ham Sandwich problem. In fact, this reduction was crucial in the proof of the PPA-completeness of the Ham Sandwich problem [Filos-Ratsikas and Goldberg, STOC'19]. Recently, a variant of the Ham Sandwich problem called α-Ham Sandwich has been studied, in which the point sets are guaranteed to be well-separated [Steiger and Zhao, DCG'10]. The complexity of this search problem remains unknown, but it is known to lie in the complexity class UEOPL [Chiu, Choudhary and Mulzer, ICALP'20]. We define the analogue of this well-separation condition in the necklace splitting problem - a necklace is n-separable, if every subset A of the n types of jewels can be separated from the types [n]⧵A by at most n separator points. Since this version of necklace splitting reduces to α-Ham Sandwich in a solution-preserving way it follows that instances of this version always have unique solutions.
We furthermore provide two FPT algorithms: The first FPT algorithm solves 2-Thief-Necklace-Splitting on (n-1+𝓁)-separable necklaces with n types of jewels and m total jewels in time 2^O(𝓁log𝓁) + O(m²). In particular, this shows that 2-Thief-Necklace-Splitting is polynomial-time solvable on n-separable necklaces. Thus, attempts to show hardness of α-Ham Sandwich through reduction from the 2-Thief-Necklace-Splitting problem cannot work. The second FPT algorithm tests (n-1+𝓁)-separability of a given necklace with n types of jewels in time 2^O(𝓁²) ⋅ n⁴. In particular, n-separability can thus be tested in polynomial time, even though testing well-separation of point sets is co-NP-complete [Bergold et al., SWAT'22].