Lesson plan

Color-coding

In computer science and graph theory, the term color-coding refers to an algorithmic technique which is useful in the discovery of network motifs. For example, it can be used to detect a simple path of length in a given graph. The traditional color-coding algorithm is probabilistic, but it can be derandomized without much overhead in the running time. Color-coding also applies to the detection of cycles of a given length, and more generally it applies to the subgraph isomorphism problem (an NP-complete problem), where it yields polynomial time algorithms when the subgraph pattern that it is trying to detect has bounded treewidth. The color-coding method was proposed and analyzed in 1994 by Noga Alon, Raphael Yuster, and Uri Zwick.

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Article summary

In computer science and graph theory, the term color-coding refers to an algorithmic technique which is useful in the discovery of network motifs. For example, it can be used to detect a simple path of length in a given graph. The traditional color-coding algorithm is probabilistic, but it can be derandomized without much overhead in the running time. Color-coding also applies to the detection of cycles of a given length, and more generally it applies to the subgraph isomorphism problem (an NP-complete problem), where it yields polynomial time algorithms when the subgraph pattern that it is trying to detect has bounded treewidth. The color-coding method was proposed and analyzed in 1994 by Noga Alon, Raphael Yuster, and Uri Zwick.

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  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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