pith. sign in

Self-referential instances of the dominating set problem are irreducible

1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

1 Pith paper citing it
abstract

We study the algorithmic decidability of the domination number in the Erdos-Renyi random graph model $G(n,p)$. We show that for a carefully chosen edge probability $p=p(n)$, the domination problem exhibits a strong irreducible property. Specifically, for any constant $0<c<1$, no algorithm that inspects only an induced subgraph of order at most $n^c$ can determine whether $G(n,p)$ contains a dominating set of size $k=\ln n$. We demonstrate that the existence of such a dominating set can be flipped by a local symmetry mapping that alters only a constant number of edges, thereby producing indistinguishable random graph instances which require exhaustive search. These results demonstrate that the extreme hardness of the dominating set problem in random graphs cannot be attributed to local structure, but instead arises from the self-referential nature and near-independence structure of the entire solution space.

fields

cs.CC 1

years

2026 1

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 1

representative citing papers

Solution independence and self-referential instances

cs.CC · 2026-05-04 · unverdicted · novelty 3.0

Solution independence distinguishes hypergraph dominating set from vertex cover, enabling irreducible self-referential instances that force algorithms to examine nearly the full input.

citing papers explorer

Showing 1 of 1 citing paper.

  • Solution independence and self-referential instances cs.CC · 2026-05-04 · unverdicted · none · ref 12 · internal anchor

    Solution independence distinguishes hypergraph dominating set from vertex cover, enabling irreducible self-referential instances that force algorithms to examine nearly the full input.