Title
Adaptive Majority Problems For Restricted Query Graphs And For Weighted Sets
Abstract
Suppose that the vertices of a graph G are colored with two colors in an unknown way. The color that occurs on more than half of the vertices is called the majority color (if it exists), and any vertex of this color is called a majority vertex. We study the problem of finding a majority vertex (or show that none exists), if we can query edges to learn whether their endpoints have the same or different colors. Denote the least number of queries needed in the worst case by m(G). It was shown by Saks and Werman that m(K-n) = n - b(n), where b(n) is the number of 1's in the binary representation of n.In this paper we initiate the study of the problem for general graphs. The obvious bounds for a connected graph G on n vertices are n - b(n) <= m(G) <= n - 1. We show that for any tree T on an even number of vertices we have m(T) = n - 1, and that for any tree T on an odd number of vertices, we have n - 65 <= m(T) <= n-2. Our proof uses results about the weighted version of the problem for K-n, which may be of independent interest. We also exhibit a sequence G(n) of graphs with m(G(n)) = n - b(n) such that G(n) has O(nb(n)) edges and n vertices. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.dam.2020.09.003
DISCRETE APPLIED MATHEMATICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Graph, Combinatorial search, Majority problem, Vertex coloring, Adaptive search, Query
Journal
288
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0166-218X
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
11