Partitioning graphs into connected parts1;y 1;y 2;zPim van ’t Hof , Daniel Paulusma and Gerhard J. Woeginger1Department of Computer Science, University of Durham,Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England.fpim.vanthof,daniel.paulusmag@durham.ac.uk2Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology,P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands.gwoegi@win.tue.nlAbstract. The 2-Disjoint Connected Subgraphs problem asks if agiven graph has two vertex-disjoint connected subgraphs containing pre-speci ed sets of vertices. We show that this problem is NP-complete evenif one of the sets has cardinality 2. The Longest Path Contractibil-ity problem asks for the largest integer ‘ for which an input graph canbe contracted to the path P on ‘ vertices. We show that the compu-‘tational complexity of the Longest Path Contractibility problemrestricted to P -free graphs jumps from being polynomially solvable to‘being NP-hard at ‘ = 6, while this jump occurs at ‘ = 5 for the 2-Disjoint Connected Subgraphs problem. We also present an exactalgorithm that solves the 2-Disjoint Connected Subgraphs problem nfaster thanO (2 ) for anyn-vertexP -free graph. For ‘ = 6, its running‘ ntime isO (1:5790 ). We modify this algorithm to solve the Longest nPathContractibility problem forP -free graphs inO (1:5790 ) time.61 IntroductionThere are several natural and elementary algorithmic problems that check if thestructure of ...
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