Solution independence distinguishes hypergraph dominating set from vertex cover, enabling irreducible self-referential instances that force algorithms to examine nearly the full input.
Self-referential instances of the dominating set problem are irreducible
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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.
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cs.CC 1years
2026 1verdicts
UNVERDICTED 1representative citing papers
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Solution independence and self-referential instances
Solution independence distinguishes hypergraph dominating set from vertex cover, enabling irreducible self-referential instances that force algorithms to examine nearly the full input.