68R05 Combinatorics
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- chirotope (2)
- circuit (2)
- cocircuit (2)
- oriented matroid (2)
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- triangulation (2)
- TOPCOM (1)
- elusive graph property (1)
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TOPCOM is a package for computing triangulations of point configurations and oriented matroids. For example, for a point configuration one can compute the chirotope, components of the flip graph of triangulations, enumerate all triangulations. The core algorithms implemented in TOPCOM are described, and implentation issues are discussed.
A graph property is called elusive (or evasive) if every algorithm for testing this property has to read in the worst case $n\choose 2$ entries of the adjacency matrix of the given graph. Several graph properties have been shown to be elusive, e.g. planarity (Best et al) or $k$-colorability (Bollobas). A famous conjecture of Karp says that every non-trivial monotone graph property is elusive. We prove that a non-monotone but hereditary graph property is elusive: perfectness.
Oriented matroids are combinatorial structures that encode the combinatorics of point configurations. The set of all triangulations of a point configuration depends only on its oriented matroid. We survey the most important ingredients necessary to exploit oriented matroids as a data structure for computing all triangulations of a point configuration, and report on experience with an implementation of these concepts in the software package TOPCOM. Next, we briefly overview the construction and an application of the secondary polytope of a point configuration, and calculate some examples illustrating how our tools were integrated into the {\sc polymake} framework.