Voting is a simple mechanism to aggregate the preferences of agents. Many voting rules have been shown to be NP-hard to manipulate. However, a number of recent theoretical results suggest that this complexity may only be in the worst-case since manipulation is often easy in practice. In this paper, we show that empirical studies are useful in improving our understanding of this issue. We demonstrate that there is a smooth transition in the probability that a coalition can elect a desired candidate using the veto rule as the size of the manipulating coalition increases. We show that a rescaled probability curve displays a simple and universal form independent of the size of the problem. We argue that manipulation of the veto rule is asymptotically easy for many independent and identically distributed votes even when the coalition of manipulators is critical in size. Based on this argument, we identify a situation in which manipulation is computationally hard. This is when votes are highly correlated and the election is "hung". We show, however, that even a single uncorrelated voter is enough to make manipulation easy again.
Finally, similar phenomena have been observed in the phase transition for the Hamiltonian cycle problem @cite_22 @cite_11 . If the number of edges is small, there is likely to be a node of degree smaller than 2. There cannot therefore be any Hamiltonian cycle. By the time that there are enough edges for all nodes to be of degree 2, there are likely to be many possible Hamiltonian cycles and even a simple heuristic can find one. Thus, the phase transition in the existence of a Hamiltonian cycle is not associated with hard instances of the problem. The behavior seen here is similar. By the time the coalition is large enough to manipulate the result, the variance in scores between the candidates is likely to be so large that computing a successful manipulation or proving none is possible is easy.
@cite_22 @cite_11
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Using an improved backtrack algorithm with sophisticated pruning techniques, we revise previous observations correlating a high frequency of hard to solve Hamiltonian cycle instances with the Gn,m phase transition between Hamiltonicity and non-Hamiltonicity. Instead all tested graphs of 100 to 1500 vertices are easily solved. When we artificially restrict the degree sequence with a bounded maximum degree, although there is some increase in difficulty, the frequency of hard graphs is still low. When we consider more regular graphs based on a generalization of knight's tours, we observe frequent instances of really hard graphs, but on these the average degree is bounded by a constant. We design a set of graphs with a feature our algorithm is unable to detect and so are very hard for our algorithm, but in these we can vary the average degree from O(1) to O(n). We have so far found no class of graphs correlated with the Gn,m phase transition which asymptotically produces a high frequency of hard instances. The “classical” random graph models, in particular G(n,p), are “homogeneous,” in the sense that the degrees (for example) tend to be concentrated around a typical value. Many graphs arising in the real world do not have this property, having, for example, power-law degree distributions. Thus there has been a lot of recent interest in defining and studying “inhomogeneous” random graph models. One of the most studied properties of these new models is their “robustness”, or, equivalently, the “phase transition” as an edge density parameter is varied. For G(n,p), p = c n, the phase transition at c = 1 has been a central topic in the study of random graphs for well over 40 years. Many of the new inhomogeneous models are rather complicated; although there are exceptions, in most cases precise questions such as determining exactly the critical point of the phase transition are approachable only when there is independence between the edges. Fortunately, some models studied have this property already, and others can be approximated by models with independence. Here we introduce a very general model of an inhomogeneous random graph with (conditional) independence between the edges, which scales so that the number of edges is linear in the number of vertices. This scaling corresponds to the p = c n scaling for G(n,p) used to study the phase transition; also, it seems to be a property of many large real-world graphs. Our model includes as special cases many models previously studied. We show that, under one very weak assumption (that the expected number of edges is “what it should be”), many properties of the model can be determined, in particular the critical point of the phase transition, and the size of the giant component above the transition. We do this by relating our random graphs to branching processes, which are much easier to analyze. We also consider other properties of the model, showing, for example, that when there is a giant component, it is “stable”: for a typical random graph, no matter how we add or delete o(n) edges, the size of the giant component does not change by more than o(n). © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 31, 3–122, 2007 For many random constraint satisfaction problems, by now there exist asymptotically tight estimates of the largest constraint density for which solutions exist. At the same time, for many of these problems, all known polynomial-time algorithms stop finding solutions at much smaller densities. For example, it is well-known that it is easy to color a random graph using twice as many colors as its chromatic number. Indeed, some of the simplest possible coloring algorithms achieve this goal. Given the simplicity of those algorithms, one would expect room for improvement. Yet, to date, no algorithm is known that uses (2 - epsiv)chi colors, in spite of efforts by numerous researchers over the years. In view of the remarkable resilience of this factor of 2 against every algorithm hurled at it, we find it natural to inquire into its origin. We do so by analyzing the evolution of the set of k-colorings of a random graph, viewed as a subset of 1,...,k n, as edges are added. We prove that the factor of 2 corresponds in a precise mathematical sense to a phase transition in the geometry of this set. Roughly speaking, we prove that the set of k-colorings looks like a giant ball for k ges 2chi, but like an error-correcting code for k les (2 - epsiv)chi. We also prove that an analogous phase transition occurs both in random k-SAT and in random hypergraph 2-coloring. And that for each of these three problems, the location of the transition corresponds to the point where all known polynomial-time algorithms fail. To prove our results we develop a general technique that allows us to establish rigorously much of the celebrated 1-step replica-symmetry-breaking hypothesis of statistical physics for random CSPs. We consider a random sparse graph with bounded average degree, in which a subset of vertices has higher connectivity than the background. In particular, the average degree inside this subset of vertices is larger than outside (but still bounded). Given a realization of such graph, we aim at identifying the hidden subset of vertices. This can be regarded as a model for the problem of finding a tightly knitted community in a social network, or a cluster in a relational dataset. In this paper we present two sets of contributions: (i) We use the cavity method from spin glass theory to derive an exact phase diagram for the reconstruction problem. In particular, as the difference in edge probability increases, the problem undergoes two phase transitions, a static phase transition and a dynamic one. (ii) We establish rigorous bounds on the dynamic phase transition and prove that, above a certain threshold, a local algorithm (belief propagation) correctly identify most of the hidden set. Below the same threshold no local algorithm can achieve this goal. However, in this regime the subset can be identified by exhaustive search. For small hidden sets and large average degree, the phase transition for local algorithms takes an intriguingly simple form. Local algorithms succeed with high probability for ( _ in - _ out > _ out e ) and fail for ( _ in - _ out < _ out e ) (with ( _ in ), ( _ out ) the average degrees inside and outside the community). We argue that spectral algorithms are also ineffective in the latter regime. It is an open problem whether any polynomial time algorithms might succeed for ( _ in - _ out < _ out e ). For many random constraint satisfaction problems such as random satisfiability or random graph or hypergraph coloring, the best current estimates of the threshold for the existence of solutions are based on the first and the second moment method. However, in most cases these techniques do not yield matching upper and lower bounds. Sophisticated but non-rigorous arguments from statistical mechanics have ascribed this discrepancy to the existence of a phase transition called condensation that occurs shortly before the actual threshold for the existence of solutions and that affects the combinatorial nature of the problem (Krzakala, Montanari, Ricci-Tersenghi, Semerjian, Zdeborova: PNAS 2007). In this paper we prove for the first time that a condensation transition exists in a natural random CSP, namely in random hypergraph 2-coloring. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the second moment method applied to the number of 2-colorings breaks down strictly before the condensation transition. Our proof also yields slightly improved bounds on the threshold for random hypergraph 2-colorability. Based on a non-rigorous formalism called the “cavity method”, physicists have put forward intriguing predictions on phase transitions in diluted mean-field models, in which the geometry of interactions is induced by a sparse random graph or hypergraph. One example of such a model is the graph coloring problem on the Erdős–Renyi random graph G(n, d n), which can be viewed as the zero temperature case of the Potts antiferromagnet. The cavity method predicts that in addition to the k-colorability phase transition studied intensively in combinatorics, there exists a second phase transition called the condensation phase transition ( in Proc Natl Acad Sci 104:10318–10323, 2007). In fact, there is a conjecture as to the precise location of this phase transition in terms of a certain distributional fixed point problem. In this paper we prove this conjecture for k exceeding a certain constant k0. We present a detailed experimental investigation of the easy-hard-easy phase transition for randomly generated instances of satisfiability problems. Problems in the hard part of the phase transition have been extensively used for benchmarking satisfiability algorithms. This study demonstrates that problem classes and regions of the phase transition previously thought to be easy can sometimes be orders of magnitude more difficult than the worst problems in problem classes and regions of the phase transition considered hard. These difficult problems are either hard unsatisfiable problems or are satisfiable problems which give a hard unsatisfiable subproblem following a wrong split. Whilst these hard unsatisfiable problems may have short proofs, these appear to be difficult to find, and other proofs are long and hard. We consider the problem of coloring the vertices of a large sparse random graph with a given number of colors so that no adjacent vertices have the same color. Using the cavity method, we present a detailed and systematic analytical study of the space of proper colorings (solutions). We show that for a fixed number of colors and as the average vertex degree (number of constraints) increases, the set of solutions undergoes several phase transitions similar to those observed in the mean field theory of glasses. First, at the clustering transition, the entropically dominant part of the phase space decomposes into an exponential number of pure states so that beyond this transition a uniform sampling of solutions becomes hard. Afterward, the space of solutions condenses over a finite number of the largest states and consequently the total entropy of solutions becomes smaller than the annealed one. Another transition takes place when in all the entropically dominant states a finite fraction of nodes freezes so that each of these nodes is allowed a single color in all the solutions inside the state. Eventually, above the coloring threshold, no more solutions are available. Over the past decade, physicists have developed deep but non-rigorous techniques for studying phase transitions in discrete structures. Recently, their ideas have been harnessed to obtain improved rigorous results on the phase transitions in binary problems such as random @math -SAT or @math -NAESAT (e.g., Coja-Oghlan and Panagiotou: STOC 2013). However, these rigorous arguments, typically centered around the second moment method, do not extend easily to problems where there are more than two possible values per variable. The single most intensely studied example of such a problem is random graph @math -coloring. Here we develop a novel approach to the second moment method in this problem. This new method, inspired by physics conjectures on the geometry of the set of @math -colorings, allows us to establish a substantially improved lower bound on the @math -colorability threshold. The new lower bound is within an additive @math of a simple first-moment upper bound and within @math of the physics conjecture. By comparison, the best previous lower bound left a gap of about @math , unbounded in terms of the number of colors [Achlioptas, Naor: STOC 2004]. We prove the existence of an asymptotic phase transition threshold on community detectability for the spectral modularity method [M. E. J. Newman, Phys. Rev. E 74, 036104 (2006) and Proc. National Academy of Sciences. 103, 8577 (2006)] under a stochastic block model. The phase transition on community detectability occurs as the inter-community edge connection probability @math grows. This phase transition separates a sub-critical regime of small @math , where modularity-based community detection successfully identifies the communities, from a super-critical regime of large @math where successful community detection is impossible. We show that, as the community sizes become large, the asymptotic phase transition threshold @math is equal to @math , where @math is the within-community edge connection probability. Thus the phase transition threshold is universal in the sense that it does not depend on the ratio of community sizes. The universal phase transition phenomenon is validated by simulations for moderately sized communities. Using the derived expression for the phase transition threshold we propose an empirical method for estimating this threshold from real-world data. We study an evolving spatial network in which sequentially arriving vertices are joined to existing vertices at random according to a rule that combines preference according to degree with preference according to spatial proximity. We investigate phase transitions in graph structure as the relative weighting of these two components of the attachment rule is varied. Previous work of one of the authors showed that when the geometric component is weak, the limiting degree sequence of the resulting graph coincides with that of the standard Barab 'asi--Albert preferential attachment model. We show that at the other extreme, in the case of a sufficiently strong geometric component, the limiting degree sequence coincides with that of a purely geometric model, the on-line nearest-neighbour graph, which is of interest in its own right and for which we prove some extensions of known results. We also show the presence of an intermediate regime, in which the behaviour differs significantly from both the on-line nearest-neighbour graph and the Barab 'asi--Albert model; in this regime, we obtain a stretched exponential upper bound on the degree sequence. Our results lend some mathematical support to simulation studies of Manna and Sen, while proving that the power law to stretched exponential phase transition occurs at a different point from the one conjectured by those authors. Recently, the stability of certain topological phases of matter under weak perturbations was proven. Here, we present a short, alternate proof of the same result. We consider models of topological quantum order for which the unperturbed Hamiltonian H 0 can be written as a sum of local pairwise commuting projectors on a D-dimensional lattice. We consider a perturbed Hamiltonian H = H 0 + V involving a generic perturbation V that can be written as a sum of short-range bounded-norm interactions. We prove that if the strength of V is below a constant threshold value then H has well-defined spectral bands originating from the low-lying eigenvalues of H 0. These bands are separated from the rest of the spectrum and from each other by a constant gap. The width of the band originating from the smallest eigenvalue of H 0 decays faster than any power of the lattice size. We study several statistical mechanical models on a general tree. Particular attention is devoted to the classical Heisenberg models, where the state space is the d-dimensional unit sphere and the interactions are proportional to the cosines of the angles between neighboring spins. The phenomenon of interest here is the classification of phase transition (non-uniqueness of the Gibbs state) according to whether it is robust. In many cases, including all of the Heisenberg and Potts models, occurrence of robust phase transition is determined by the geometry (branching number) of the tree in a way that parallels the situation with independent percolation and usual phase transition for the Ising model. The critical values for robust phase transition for the Heisenberg and Potts models are also calculated exactly. In some cases, such as the q > 3 Potts model, robust phase transition and usual phase transition do not coincide, while in other cases, such as the Heisenberg models, we conjecture that robust phase transition and usual phase transition are equivalent. In addition, we show that symmetry breaking is equivalent to the existence of a phase transition, a fact believed but not known for the rotor model on Z 2 . The following question is due to Chatterjee and Varadhan 2011. Fix 0<p<r<1 and take G Gn,p, the Erdi¾?s-Renyi random graph with edge density p, conditioned to have at least as many triangles as the typical Gn,r. Is G close in cut-distance to a typical Gn,r? Via a beautiful new framework for large deviation principles in Gn,p, Chatterjee and Varadhan gave bounds on the replica symmetric phase, the region of p,r where the answer is positive. They further showed that for any small enough p there are at least two phase transitions as r varies. We settle this question by identifying the replica symmetric phase for triangles and more generally for any fixed d-regular graph. By analyzing the variational problem arising from the framework of Chatterjee and Varadhan we show that the replica symmetry phase consists of all p,r such that rd,hpr lies on the convex minorant of xi¾?hpx1 d where hp is the rate function of a binomial with parameter p. In particular, the answer for triangles involves hpx rather than the natural guess of hpx1 3 where symmetry was previously known. Analogous results are obtained for linear hypergraphs as well as the setting where the largest eigenvalue of G Gn,p is conditioned to exceed the typical value of the largest eigenvalue of Gn,r. Building on the work of Chatterjee and Diaconis 2012 we obtain additional results on a class of exponential random graphs including a new range of parameters where symmetry breaking occurs. En route we give a short alternative proof of a graph homomorphism inequality due to Kahn 2001 and Galvin and Tet ali 2004. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 47, 109-146, 2015 We consider models given by Hamiltonians of the form View the MathML sourceH(I,f,p,q,t;e)=h(I)+?j=1n±(12pj2+Vj(qj))+eQ(I,f,p,q,t;e) Turn MathJax on where I?I?Rd,f?TdI?I?Rd,f?Td, p,q?Rnp,q?Rn, t?T1t?T1. These are higher dimensional analogues, both in the center and hyperbolic directions, of the models studied in , and and are usually called “a-priori unstable Hamiltonian systems”. All these models present the large gap problem. We show that, for 0<e«10<e«1, under regularity and explicit non-degeneracy conditions on the model, there are orbits whose action variables I perform rather arbitrary excursions in a domain of size O(1)O(1). This domain includes resonance lines and, hence, large gaps among d-dimensional KAM tori. This phenomenon is known as Arnold diffusion. The method of proof follows closely the strategy of and . The main new phenomenon that appears when the dimension d of the center directions is larger than one is the existence of multiple resonances in the space of actions I?I?RdI?I?Rd. We show that, since these multiple resonances happen in sets of codimension greater than one in the space of actions I, they can be contoured. This corresponds to the mechanism called diffusion across resonances in the Physics literature. The present paper, however, differs substantially from and . On the technical details of the proofs, we have taken advantage of the theory of the scattering map developed in [31]—notably the symplectic properties—which were not available when the above papers were written. We have analyzed the conditions imposed on the resonances in more detail. More precisely, we have found that there is a simple condition on the Melnikov potential which allows us to conclude that the resonances are crossed. In particular, this condition does not depend on the resonances. So that the results are new even when applied to the models in and Consider the random graph models G(n, #edges = M) and G(n, Prob(edge) = p) with M = M(n) = (1 + )n-1 3)n 2 and p = p(n) = (1 +An-1 3) n . For 1 > -1 define an i-component of a random graph as a component which has exactly I more edges than vertices. Call an i-component with I > 1 a complex component. For both models, we show that when A is constant, the expected number of complex components is bounded, almost surely (a.s.) each of these components (if any exist) has size of order n2 3, and the maximum value of I is bounded in probability. We prove that a.s. the largest suspended tree in each complex component has size of order n2 3, and deletion of all suspended trees results in a "smoothed" graph of size of order n 3, with the maximum vertex degree 3. The total number of branching vertices, i.e., of degree 3, is bounded in probability. Thus, each complex component is almost surely topologically equivalent to a 3-regular multigraph of a uniformly bounded size. Lengths of the shortest cycle and of the shortest path between two branching vertices of a smoothed graph are each of order n 3. We find a relatively simple integral formula for the limit distribution of the numbers of complex components, which implies, in particular, that all values of the "complexity spectrum" have positive limiting probabilities. We also answer questions raised by Erdos and Renyi back in 1960. It is proven that there exists p(A), the limiting planarity probability, with 0 < p(A) < 1, p(-oo) = 1, p(oo) = 0. In particular, G(n, M) (G(n, p), resp.) is almost surely nonplanar iff (M n 2)n-213 -* 00 ((np I)n-1 3) -+ oo, resp.). We study a family of closely-related distributed graph problems, which we call degree splitting, where roughly speaking the objective is to partition (or orient) the edges such that each node's degree is split almost uniformly. Our findings lead to answers for a number of problems, a sampling of which includes: • We present a poly log n round deterministic algorithm for (2Δ−1)·(1+o(1))-edge-coloring, where Δ denotes the maximum degree. Modulo the 1 + o(1) factor, this settles one of the long-standing open problems of the area from the 1990's (see e.g. Panconesi and Srinivasan [PODC'92]). Indeed, a weaker requirement of (2Δ − 1) · poly log Δ-edge-coloring in poly log n rounds was asked for in the 4th open question in the Distributed Graph Coloring book by Barenboim and Elkin. • We show that sinkless orientation---i.e., orienting edges such that each node has at least one out-going edge---on Δ-regular graphs can be solved in O(logΔ log n) rounds randomized and in O(logΔ n) rounds deterministically. These prove the corresponding lower bounds by [STOC'16] and Chang, Kopelowitz, and Pettie [FOCS'16] to be tight. Moreover, these show that sinkless orientation exhibits an exponential separation between its randomized and deterministic complexities, akin to the results of for Δ-coloring Δ-regular trees. • We present a randomized O(log4 n) round algorithm for orienting a-arboricity graphs with maximum out-degree a(1 + e). This can be also turned into a decomposition into a(1 + e) forests when a = Ω(log n) and into a(1 + e) pseduo-forests when a = o(log n). Obtaining an efficient distributed decomposition into less than 2a forests was stated as the 10th open problem in the book by Barenboim and Elkin. We consider a symmetric random walk on a connected graph, where each edge is labeled with the probability of transition between the two adjacent vertices. The associated Markov chain has a uniform equilibrium distribution; the rate of convergence to this distribution, i.e., the mixing rate of the Markov chain, is determined by the second largest eigenvalue modulus (SLEM) of the transition probability matrix. In this paper we address the problem of assigning probabilities to the edges of the graph in such a way as to minimize the SLEM, i.e., the problem of finding the fastest mixing Markov chain on the graph. We show that this problem can be formulated as a convex optimization problem, which can in turn be expressed as a semidefinite program (SDP). This allows us to easily compute the (globally) fastest mixing Markov chain for any graph with a modest number of edges (say, @math ) using standard numerical methods for SDPs. Larger problems can be solved by exploiting various types of symmetry and structure in the problem, and far larger problems (say, 100,000 edges) can be solved using a subgradient method we describe. We compare the fastest mixing Markov chain to those obtained using two commonly used heuristics: the maximum-degree method, and the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm. For many of the examples considered, the fastest mixing Markov chain is substantially faster than those obtained using these heuristic methods. We derive the Lagrange dual of the fastest mixing Markov chain problem, which gives a sophisticated method for obtaining (arbitrarily good) bounds on the optimal mixing rate, as well as the optimality conditions. Finally, we describe various extensions of the method, including a solution of the problem of finding the fastest mixing reversible Markov chain, on a fixed graph, with a given equilibrium distribution. We illustrate the use of phase transition behavior in the study of heuristics. Using an “annealed” theory, we define a parameter that measures the “constrainedness” of an ensemble of number partitioning problems. We identify a phase transition at a critical value of constrainedness. We then show that constrainedness can be used to analyze and compare algorithms and heuristics for number partitioning in a precise and quantitative manner. For example, we demonstrate that on uniform random problems both the Karmarkar–Karp and greedy heuristics minimize the constrainedness, but that the decisions made by the Karmarkar–Karp heuristic are superior at reducing constrainedness. This supports the better performance observed experimentally for the Karmarkar–Karp heuristic. Our results refute a conjecture of Fu that phase transition behavior does not occur in number partitioning. Additionally, they demonstrate that phase transition behavior is useful for more than just simple benchmarking. It can, for instance, be used to analyze heuristics, and to compare the quality of heuristic solutions. Hamiltonian dynamics can be used to produce distant proposals for the Metropolis algorithm, thereby avoiding the slow exploration of the state space that results from the diffusive behaviour of simple random-walk proposals. Though originating in physics, Hamiltonian dynamics can be applied to most problems with continuous state spaces by simply introducing fictitious "momentum" variables. A key to its usefulness is that Hamiltonian dynamics preserves volume, and its trajectories can thus be used to define complex mappings without the need to account for a hard-to-compute Jacobian factor - a property that can be exactly maintained even when the dynamics is approximated by discretizing time. In this review, I discuss theoretical and practical aspects of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and present some of its variations, including using windows of states for deciding on acceptance or rejection, computing trajectories using fast approximations, tempering during the course of a trajectory to handle isolated modes, and short-cut methods that prevent useless trajectories from taking much computation time.