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arXiv · 1606.01026

NP-completeness in the gossip monoid

Peter Fenner·Marianne Johnson·Mark Kambites
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Abstract

Gossip monoids form an algebraic model of networks with exclusive, transient connections in which nodes, when they form a connection, exchange all known information. They also arise naturally in pure mathematics, as the monoids generated by the set of all equivalence relations on a given finite set under relational composition. We prove that a number of important decision problems for these monoids (including the membership problem, and hence the problem of deciding whether a given state of knowledge can arise in a network of the kind under consideration) are NP-complete. As well as being of interest in their own right, these results shed light on the apparent difficulty of establishing the cardinalities of the gossip monoids: a problem which has attracted some attention in the last few years.

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Peter Fenner, Marianne Johnson, Mark Kambites. 2016-06-03. NP-completeness in the gossip monoid. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01026

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