Planarity, determinants, permanents, and (unique) matchings

  • Authors:
  • Samir Datta;Raghav Kulkarni;Nutan Limaye;Meena Mahajan

  • Affiliations:
  • Chennai Mathematical Institute, Siruseri, Chennai, India;Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Chicago;The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India;The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India

  • Venue:
  • CSR'07 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Computer Science: theory and applications
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We explore the restrictiveness of planarity on the complexity of computing the determinant and the permanent, and show that both problems remain as hard as in the general case, i.e. GapL and #P complete. On the other hand, both bipartite planarity and bimodal planarity bring the complexity of permanents down (but no further) to that of determinants. The permanent or the determinant modulo 2 is complete for ⊕L, and we show that parity of paths in a layered grid graph (which is bimodal planar) is also complete for this class. We also relate the complexity of grid graph reachability to that of testing existence/uniqueness of a perfect matching in a planar bipartite graph.