We present a polynomial complexity, deterministic, heuristic for solving the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem (HCP) in an undirected graph of order n. Although finding a Hamiltonian cycle is not theoretically guaranteed, we have observed that the heuristic is successful even in cases where such cycles are extremely rare, and it also performs very well on all HCP instances of large graphs listed on the TSPLIB web page. The heuristic owes its name to a visualisation of its iterations. All vertices of the graph are placed on a given circle in some order. The graph's edges are classified as either snakes or ladders, with snakes forming arcs of the circle and ladders forming its chords. The heuristic strives to place exactly n snakes on the circle, thereby forming a Hamiltonian cycle. The Snakes and Ladders Heuristic (SLH) uses transformations inspired by k−opt algorithms such as the, now classical, Lin-Kernighan heuristic to reorder the vertices on the circle in order to transform some ladders into snakes and vice versa. The use of a suitable stopping criterion ensures the heuristic terminates in polynomial time if no improvement is made in n 3 major iterations.
We propose a partitioning of the set of unlabelled, connected cubic graphs into two disjoint subsets named genes and descendants, where the cardinality of the descendants is much larger than that of the genes. The key distinction between the two subsets is the presence of special edge cut sets, called crackers, in the descendants. We show that every descendant can be created by starting from a finite set of genes, and introducing the required crackers by special breeding operations. We prove that it is always possible to identify genes that can be used to generate any given descendant, and provide inverse operations that enable their reconstruction. A number of interesting properties of genes may be inherited by the descendant, and we therefore propose a natural algorithm that decomposes a descendant into its ancestor genes. We conjecture that each descendant can only be generated by starting with a unique set of ancestor genes. The latter is supported by numerical experiments.
We present a benchmark set for Traveling salesman problem (TSP) with characteristics that are different from the existing benchmark sets. In particular, we focus on small instances which prove to be challenging for one or more state-of-the-art TSP algorithms. These instances are based on difficult instances of Hamiltonian cycle problem (HCP). This includes instances from literature, specially modified randomly generated instances, and instances arising from the conversion of other difficult problems to HCP. We demonstrate that such benchmark instances are helpful in understanding the weaknesses and strengths of algorithms. In particular, we conduct a benchmarking exercise for this new benchmark set totalling over five years of CPU time, comparing the TSP algorithms Concorde, Chained Lin-Kernighan, and LKH. We also include the HCP heuristic SLH in the benchmarking exercise. A discussion about the benefits of specifically considering outlying instances, and in particular instances which are unusually difficult relative to size, is also included.
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