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Better Balance by Being Biased: A 0.8776-Approximation for Max Bisection

Per Austrin, Siavosh Benabbas, Konstantinos Georgiou

2012 · arXiv

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From the abstract

Recently Raghavendra and Tan (SODA 2012) gave a 0.85-approximation algorithm for the Max Bisection problem. We improve their algorithm to a 0.8776-approximation. As Max Bisection is hard to approximate within $α_{GW} + ε\approx 0.8786$ under the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), our algorithm is nearly optimal. We conjecture that Max Bisection is approximable within $α_{GW}-ε$, i.e., the bisection constraint (essentially) does not make Max Cut harder. We also obtain an optimal algorithm (assuming the UGC) for the analogous variant of Max 2-Sat. Our approximation ratio for this problem exactly matches the optimal approximation ratio for Max 2-Sat, i.e., $α_{LLZ} + ε\approx 0.9401$, showing that the bisection constraint does not make Max 2-Sat harder. This improves on a 0.93-approximation for this problem due to Raghavendra and Tan.

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skissane
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What about page 4 of [0]: > We remark that, while polynomial, the running time of the algorithm is somewhat abysmal; loose estimates places it somewhere around O(n^(10^100)); the running time of the algorithm of [RT12] is similar. I don’t know if that counts as a “real problem”, and I suppose it is only a “loose estimate” too. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.0458v2.pdf
mihaild
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For example, there is 0.8776-approximation that runs in about O(n^{10^100}) https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0458v2 There are also a lot of graph problems like "distinguish 3-colorable graph from graph that can't be colored in 3 colors even after removing eps part of edges" with large polynomials (IIRC, we got something like O(n^{2^40000}) when tried to find degree explicitly).
adrianN
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Example: You want to bisect the nodes of an edge-weighted graph into two sets of equal size such that the sum of the edge weights between the two parts is maximized. The best approximation algorithm (it's NP-hard) runs in time O(n^(10^100)): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.0458v2.pdf For more examples see here http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/6660/polynomial-...

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