Digraph Decompositions and Monotonicity in Digraph Searching

TL;DR

This paper investigates the monotonicity of certain digraph searching games, demonstrating that two unresolved variants are non-monotone, and explores the limitations of digraph decompositions for algorithmic applications.

Contribution

It resolves the open problem of monotonicity for two specific digraph searching games and analyzes the limited applicability of digraph decompositions in algorithmic contexts.

Findings

Both game variants are non-monotone.

Digraph decompositions have limited algorithmic utility.

Certain problems remain NP-complete even on nearly acyclic graphs.

Abstract

We consider monotonicity problems for graph searching games. Variants of these games - defined by the type of moves allowed for the players - have been found to be closely connected to graph decompositions and associated width measures such as path- or tree-width. Of particular interest is the question whether these games are monotone, i.e. whether the cops can catch a robber without ever allowing the robber to reach positions that have been cleared before. The monotonicity problem for graph searching games has intensely been studied in the literature, but for two types of games the problem was left unresolved. These are the games on digraphs where the robber is invisible and lazy or visible and fast. In this paper, we solve the problems by giving examples showing that both types of games are non-monotone. Graph searching games on digraphs are closely related to recent proposals for digraph decompositions generalising tree-width to directed graphs. These proposals have partly been motivated by attempts to develop a structure theory for digraphs similar to the graph minor theory developed by Robertson and Seymour for undirected graphs, and partly by the immense number of algorithmic results using tree-width of undirected graphs and the hope that part of this success might be reproducible on digraphs using a directed tree-width. Unfortunately the number of applications for the digraphs measures introduced so far is still small. We therefore explore the limits of the algorithmic applicability of digraph decompositions. In particular, we show that various natural candidates for problems that might benefit from digraphs having small directed tree-width remain NP-complete even on almost acyclic graphs.