CSAIL Event Calendar: Previous Series

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 log^{4/3}() obtained by Armoni, Ta-Shma, Wigderson and Zhou. As undirected st-connectivity is complete for the class of problems solvable by symmetric, non-deterministic, 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 has presented a, space log n loglog n, 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 labelling and log-space constructible universal-exploration sequences for general graphs.