Undirected connectivity in log-space

O Reingold - Journal of the ACM (JACM), 2008 - dl.acm.org
Journal of the ACM (JACM), 2008dl.acm.org
We present a deterministic, log-space algorithm that solves st-connectivity in undirected
graphs. The previous bound on the space complexity of undirected st-connectivity was
log4/3 (⋅) obtained by Armoni, Ta-Shma, Wigderson and Zhou (JACM 2000). As undirected
st-connectivity is complete for the class of problems solvable by symmetric, nondeterministic,
log-space computations (the class SL), this algorithm implies that SL= L (where L is the class
of problems solvable by deterministic log-space computations). Independent of our work …
We present a deterministic, log-space algorithm that solves st-connectivity in undirected graphs. The previous bound on the space complexity of undirected st-connectivity was log4/3(⋅) obtained by Armoni, Ta-Shma, Wigderson and Zhou (JACM 2000). As undirected st-connectivity is complete for the class of problems solvable by symmetric, nondeterministic, log-space computations (the class SL), this algorithm implies that SL = L (where L is the class of problems solvable by deterministic log-space computations). Independent of our work (and using different techniques), Trifonov (STOC 2005) has presented an O(log n log log n)-space, deterministic algorithm for undirected st-connectivity.
Our algorithm also implies a way to construct in log-space a fixed sequence of directions that guides a deterministic walk through all of the vertices of any connected graph. Specifically, we give log-space constructible universal-traversal sequences for graphs with restricted labeling and log-space constructible universal-exploration sequences for general graphs.
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