Sphere and Dot Product Representations of Graphs

Abstract

A graph G is a k-sphere graph if there are k-dimensional real vectors v 1,..,v n such that ij∈E(G) if and only if the distance between v i and v j is at most 1. A graph G is a k-dot product graph if there are k-dimensional real vectors v 1,..,v n such that ij∈E(G) if and only if the dot product of v i and v j is at least 1. By relating these two geometric graph constructions to oriented k-hyperplane arrangements, we prove that the problems of deciding, given a graph G, whether G is a k-sphere or a k-dot product graph are NP-hard for all k>1. In the former case, this proves a conjecture of Breu and Kirkpatrick (Comput. Geom. 9:3-24, 1998). In the latter, this answers a question of Fiduccia et al. (Discrete Math. 181:113-138, 1998). Furthermore, motivated by the question of whether these two recognition problems are in NP, as well as by the implicit graph conjecture, we demonstrate that, for all k>1, there exist k-sphere graphs and k-dot product graphs such that each representation in k-dimensional real vectors needs at least an exponential number of bits to be stored in the memory of a computer. On the other hand, we show that exponentially many bits are always enough. This resolves a question of Spinrad (Efficient Graph Representations, 2003). © 2012 The Author(s).