Space-efficient construction variants of dynamic programming

  • Authors:
  • Hans L. Bodlaender;Jan Arne Telle

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, NL-3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands;Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, N-5020 Bergen, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Nordic Journal of Computing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Many dynamic programming algorithms that solve a decision problem can be modified to algorithms that solve the construction variant of the problem by additional bookkeeping and going backwards through stored answers to subproblems. It is also well known that for many dynamic programming algorithms, one can save memory space by throwing away tables of information that is no longer needed, thus reusing the memory. Somewhat surprisingly, the observation that these two modifications cannot be combined is frequently not made. In this paper we consider the case of dynamic programming algorithms on graphs of bounded treewidth. We give algorithms to solve the construction variants of such problems that use only twice the amount of memory space of the decision versions, with only a logarithmic factor increase in running time. Using the concept of strong directed treewidth we then discuss how these algorithms can be applied to dynamic programming in general.