A t-dimensional orthogonal representation of a hypergraph is an assignment of nonzero vectors in R^t to its vertices, such that every hyperedge contains two vertices whose vectors are orthogonal. The orthogonality dimension of a hypergraph H, denoted by overline{xi}(H), is the smallest integer t for which there exists a t-dimensional orthogonal representation of H. In this paper we study computational aspects of the orthogonality dimension of graphs and hypergraphs. We prove that for every k >= 4, it is NP-hard (resp. quasi-NP-hard) to distinguish n-vertex k-uniform hypergraphs H with overline{xi}(H) <= 2 from those satisfying overline{xi}(H) >= Omega(log^delta n) for some constant delta>0 (resp. overline{xi}(H) >= Omega(log^{1-o(1)} n)). For graphs, we relate the NP-hardness of approximating the orthogonality dimension to a variant of a long-standing conjecture of Stahl. We also consider the algorithmic problem in which given a graph G with overline{xi}(G) <= 3 the goal is to find an orthogonal representation of G of as low dimension as possible, and provide a polynomial time approximation algorithm based on semidefinite programming.
@InProceedings{haviv:LIPIcs.MFCS.2019.39, author = {Haviv, Ishay}, title = {{Approximating the Orthogonality Dimension of Graphs and Hypergraphs}}, booktitle = {44th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2019)}, pages = {39:1--39:15}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-117-7}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2019}, volume = {138}, editor = {Rossmanith, Peter and Heggernes, Pinar and Katoen, Joost-Pieter}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2019.39}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-109836}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2019.39}, annote = {Keywords: orthogonal representations of hypergraphs, orthogonality dimension, hardness of approximation, Kneser and Schrijver graphs, semidefinite programming} }