No Arabic abstract
A well-known conjecture of Tuza asserts that if a graph has at most $t$ pairwise edge-disjoint triangles, then it can be made triangle-free by removing at most $2t$ edges. If true, the factor 2 would be best possible. In the directed setting, also asked by Tuza, the analogous statement has recently been proven, however, the factor 2 is not optimal. In this paper, we show that if an $n$-vertex directed graph has at most $t$ pairwise arc-disjoint directed triangles, then there exists a set of at most $1.8t+o(n^2)$ arcs that meets all directed triangles. We complement our result by presenting two constructions of large directed graphs with $tinOmega(n^2)$ whose smallest such set has $1.5t-o(n^2)$ arcs.
Alon and Yuster proved that the number of orientations of any $n$-vertex graph in which every $K_3$ is transitively oriented is at most $2^{lfloor n^2/4rfloor}$ for $n geq 10^4$ and conjectured that the precise lower bound on $n$ should be $n geq 8$. We confirm their conjecture and, additionally, characterize the extremal families by showing that the balanced complete bipartite graph with $n$ vertices is the only $n$-vertex graph for which there are exactly $2^{lfloor n^2/4rfloor}$ such orientations.
Using standard methods (due to Janson, Stein-Chen, and Talagrand) from probabilistic combinatorics, we explore the following general theme: As one progresses from each member of a family of objects ${cal A}$ being covered by at most one object in a random collection ${cal C}$, to being covered at most $lambda$ times, to being covered at least once, to being covered at least $lambda$ times, a hierarchy of thresholds emerge. We will then see how such results vary according to the context, and level of dependence introduced. Examples will be from extremal set theory, combinatorics, and additive number theory.
We study several problems on geometric packing and covering with movement. Given a family $mathcal{I}$ of $n$ intervals of $kappa$ distinct lengths, and another interval $B$, can we pack the intervals in $mathcal{I}$ inside $B$ (respectively, cover $B$ by the intervals in $mathcal{I}$) by moving $tau$ intervals and keeping the other $sigma = n - tau$ intervals unmoved? We show that both packing and covering are W[1]-hard with any one of $kappa$, $tau$, and $sigma$ as single parameter, but are FPT with combined parameters $kappa$ and $tau$. We also obtain improved polynomial-time algorithms for packing and covering, including an $O(nlog^2 n)$ time algorithm for covering, when all intervals in $mathcal{I}$ have the same length.
Given a convex disk $K$ and a positive integer $k$, let $vartheta_T^k(K)$ and $vartheta_L^k(K)$ denote the $k$-fold translative covering density and the $k$-fold lattice covering density of $K$, respectively. Let $T$ be a triangle. In a very recent paper, K. Sriamorn proved that $vartheta_L^k(T)=frac{2k+1}{2}$. In this paper, we will show that $vartheta_T^k(T)=vartheta_L^k(T)$.
We introduce a simple and efficient algorithm for stochastic linear bandits with finitely many actions that is asymptotically optimal and (nearly) worst-case optimal in finite time. The approach is based on the frequentist information-directed sampling (IDS) framework, with a surrogate for the information gain that is informed by the optimization problem that defines the asymptotic lower bound. Our analysis sheds light on how IDS balances the trade-off between regret and information and uncovers a surprising connection between the recently proposed primal-dual methods and the IDS algorithm. We demonstrate empirically that IDS is competitive with UCB in finite-time, and can be significantly better in the asymptotic regime.