,
Liana Khazaliya
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Crossing Number is a celebrated problem in graph drawing. It is known to be NP-complete since the 1980s, and fairly involved techniques were already required to show its fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by the vertex cover number. In this paper we prove that computing exactly the crossing number is NP-hard even for graphs of path-width 12 (and as a result, for simple graphs of path-width 13 and tree-width 9). Thus, while tree-width and path-width have been very successful tools in many graph algorithm scenarios, our result shows that general crossing number computations unlikely (under P≠ NP) could be successfully tackled using graph decompositions of bounded width, what has been a "tantalizing open problem" [S. Cabello, Hardness of Approximation for Crossing Number, 2013] till now.
@InProceedings{hlineny_et_al:LIPIcs.ISAAC.2024.40,
author = {Hlin\v{e}n\'{y}, Petr and Khazaliya, Liana},
title = {{Crossing Number Is NP-Hard for Constant Path-Width (And Tree-Width)}},
booktitle = {35th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2024)},
pages = {40:1--40:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-354-6},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2024},
volume = {322},
editor = {Mestre, Juli\'{a}n and Wirth, Anthony},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2024.40},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-221677},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2024.40},
annote = {Keywords: Graph Drawing, Crossing Number, Tree-width, Path-width}
}