Finding all vertices on negative cycles [closed]

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I know that the problem of checking whether given edge of a weighted digraph belongs to a negative cycle is NP-complete (Finding the minimal subgraph that contains all negative cycles) and Bellman-Ford allows to check a vertex for the same thing in O(|V|*|E|) time. But what if I want to find all vertices belonging to negative cycles? I wonder if it could be done faster than Floyd-Warshall's O(|V|^3).

Answer 1

I don't think Floyd-Warshall does the job of finding these vertices. Using a similar approach as taken in the post you're referring to, it can be shown that finding the set of all vertices that lie on a negative cycle is NP-complete as well.

The related post shows that one may use the algorithm to find the set of all edges that lie on a negative cycle to solve the hamiltonian cycle problem, which means that the former problem is NP-complete. If we can reduce the problem of finding all edges that lie on a negative cycle to the problem of finding the set of all vertices that lie on a negative cycle, we've shown NP-completeness of the latter problem.

For each edge (u,w) in your weighted digraph, introduce a new auxiliary vertex v, and split (u, w) in two edges (u, v) and (v, w). The weight of (u, w) can be assigned to either (u, v) or (v, w). Now apply the magic polynomial-time algorithm to find all the vertices that lie on a negative cycle, and take the subset that consists of the auxiliary vertices. Since each auxiliary vertex is associated with an edge, we've solved the problem of finding the minimal subgraph that contains all negative cycles, and we can thus also solve the hamiltonian cycle problem in polynomial time, which implies P = NP. Assuming P != NP, finding all vertices that lie on a negative cycle is NP-complete.