Trading space for time in undirected s-t connectivity

  • Authors:
  • A. Z. Broder;A. R. Karlin;P. Raghavan;E. Upfal

  • Affiliations:
  • DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;BIBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA

  • Venue:
  • STOC '89 Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Aleliunas et al. [1] posed the following question: “The reachability problem for undirected graphs can be solved in logspace and O(mn) time [m is the number of edges and n is the number of vertices] by a probabilistic algorithm that simulates a random walk, or in linear time and space by a conventional deterministic graph traversal algorithm. Is there a spectrum of time-space trade-offs between these extremes?” We answer this question in the affirmative for linear-sized graphs by presenting an algorithm which is faster than the random walk by a factor essentially proportional to the size of its workspace. For denser graphs, the algorithm is faster than the random walk but the speed-up factor is smaller.