A Fast Coloring Oracle for Average Case Hypergraphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Marcussen, Cassandra, Pyne, Edward, Rubinfeld, Ronitt, Shapira, Asaf, Tauber, Shlomo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Marcussen, Cassandra
Pyne, Edward
Rubinfeld, Ronitt
Shapira, Asaf
Tauber, Shlomo
author_facet Marcussen, Cassandra
Pyne, Edward
Rubinfeld, Ronitt
Shapira, Asaf
Tauber, Shlomo
contents Hypergraph $2$-colorability is one of the classical NP-hard problems. Person and Schacht [SODA'09] designed a deterministic algorithm whose expected running time is polynomial over a uniformly chosen $2$-colorable $3$-uniform hypergraph. Lee, Molla, and Nagle recently extended this to $k$-uniform hypergraphs for all $k\geq 3$. Both papers relied heavily on the regularity lemma, hence their analysis was involved and their running time hid tower-type constants. Our first result in this paper is a new simple and elementary deterministic $2$-coloring algorithm that reproves the theorems of Person-Schacht and Lee-Molla-Nagle while avoiding the use of the regularity lemma. We also show how to turn our new algorithm into a randomized one with average expected running time of only $O(n)$. Our second and main result gives what we consider to be the ultimate evidence of just how easy it is to find a $2$-coloring of an average $2$-colorable hypergraph. We define a coloring oracle to be an algorithm which, given vertex $v$, assigns color red/blue to $v$ while inspecting as few edges as possible, so that the answers to any sequence of queries to the oracle are consistent with a single legal $2$-coloring of the input. Surprisingly, we show that there is a coloring oracle that, on average, can answer every vertex query in time $O(1)$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Fast Coloring Oracle for Average Case Hypergraphs
Marcussen, Cassandra
Pyne, Edward
Rubinfeld, Ronitt
Shapira, Asaf
Tauber, Shlomo
Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Complexity
Combinatorics
Hypergraph $2$-colorability is one of the classical NP-hard problems. Person and Schacht [SODA'09] designed a deterministic algorithm whose expected running time is polynomial over a uniformly chosen $2$-colorable $3$-uniform hypergraph. Lee, Molla, and Nagle recently extended this to $k$-uniform hypergraphs for all $k\geq 3$. Both papers relied heavily on the regularity lemma, hence their analysis was involved and their running time hid tower-type constants. Our first result in this paper is a new simple and elementary deterministic $2$-coloring algorithm that reproves the theorems of Person-Schacht and Lee-Molla-Nagle while avoiding the use of the regularity lemma. We also show how to turn our new algorithm into a randomized one with average expected running time of only $O(n)$. Our second and main result gives what we consider to be the ultimate evidence of just how easy it is to find a $2$-coloring of an average $2$-colorable hypergraph. We define a coloring oracle to be an algorithm which, given vertex $v$, assigns color red/blue to $v$ while inspecting as few edges as possible, so that the answers to any sequence of queries to the oracle are consistent with a single legal $2$-coloring of the input. Surprisingly, we show that there is a coloring oracle that, on average, can answer every vertex query in time $O(1)$.
title A Fast Coloring Oracle for Average Case Hypergraphs
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Complexity
Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10691