Finding Scores in Tournaments

Abstract

A tournamentTnis an orientation of the complete graph onnvertices. We continue the algorithmic study initiated by10of recognizing various directed trees in tournaments. Hell and Rosenfeld studied the complexity of finding various oriented paths in tournaments by probing edge directions. Here, we investigate the complexity of finding a vertex of prescribed outdegree (or indegree) in the same model. We show that the complexity of finding a vertex of outdegreek(≤(n−1)/2) inTnis Θ(nk). This bound is in sharp contrast to the Θ(n) bound for selection in the case of transitive tournaments. We also establish tight bounds for finding vertices of prescribed degree from the adjacency matrix of general directed/undirected graphs. These bounds generalize the classical bound of11for finding a sink (a vertex of outdegree 0 and indegreen−1) in a directed graph.