Improving a fixed parameter tractability time bound for the shadow problem

摘要

Consider a forest of k trees and n nodes together with a (partial) function σ mapping leaves of the trees to non-root nodes of other trees. Define the shadow of a leaf ℓ to be the subtree rooted at σ(ℓ). The shadow problem asks whether there is a set S of leaves exactly one from each tree such that none of these leaves lies in the shadow of another leaf in S. This graph theoretical problem as shown in Franco et al. (Discrete Appl. Math. 96 (1999) 89) is equivalent to the falsifiability problem for pure implicational Boolean formulas over n variables with k occurences of the constant false as introduced in: Heusch J. Wiedermann, P. Hajek (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twentieth International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS’95), Prague, Czech Republic, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 969, Springer, Berlin, 1995, pp. 221–226, where its NP-completeness is shown for arbitrary values of k and a time bound of O(nk) for fixed k was obtained. In Franco et al. (1999) this bound is improved to O(n2kk) showing the problem's fixed parameter tractability (Congr. Numer. 87 (1992) 161). In this paper the bound O(n33k) is achieved by dynamic programming techniques thus significantly improving the fixed parameter part.