DOI

  • Marek Cygan
  • Fedor V. Fomin
  • Alexander Golovnev
  • Alexander S. Kulikov
  • Ivan Mihajlin
  • Jakub Pachocki
  • Arkadiusz Socała

We prove that unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) fails, deciding if there is a homomorphism from graph G to graph H cannot be done in time |V(H)|o(|V(G)|). We also show an exponential-time reduction from Graph Homomorphism to Subgraph Isomorphism. This rules out (subject to ETH) a possibility of |V(H)|o(|V(H)|)-time algorithm deciding if graph G is a subgraph of H. For both problems our lower bounds asymptotically match the running time of brute-force algorithms trying all possible mappings of one graph into another. Thus, our work closes the gap in the known complexity of these fundamental problems. Moreover, as a consequence of our reductions, conditional lower bounds follow for other related problems such as Locally Injective Homomorphism, Graph Minors, Topological Graph Minors, Minimum Distortion Embedding and Quadratic Assignment Problem.

Original languageEnglish
Article number18
JournalJournal of the ACM
Volume64
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2017

    Research areas

  • Exponential time hypothesis, Graph embedding, Graph homomorphism, Lower bounds, Subgraph isomorphism

    Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Artificial Intelligence

ID: 49820784