The complexity of the parity argument with potential

摘要

The parity argument principle states that every finite graph has an even number of odd degree vertices. We consider the problem whose totality is guaranteed by the parity argument on a graph with potential. In this paper, we show that the problem of finding an unknown odd-degree vertex or a local optimum vertex on a graph with potential is polynomially equivalent to EndOfPotentialLine if the maximum degree is at most three. However, even if the maximum degree is 4, such a problem is -complete. To show the complexity of this problem, we provide new results on multiple-source variants of EndOfPotentialLine, which is the canonical problem for EOPL. This result extends the work by Goldberg and Hollender; they studied similar variants of EndOfLine.