Publication details
Therese Biedl, Brona Brejova, Erik D. Demaine, Angele M. Hamel, Alejandro Lopez-Ortiz, Tomas Vinar.
Finding hidden independent sets in interval graphs.
Theoretical Computer Science,
310(1-3):287-307.
January 2004.
Early version in COCOON 2003.
Preprint, 216Kb | Download from publisher | Early version | BibTeX | MathSciNet
Abstract
We design efficient competitive algorithms for discovering hidden information using few queries. Specifically, consider a game in a given set of intervals (and their implied interval graph G) in which our goal is to discover an (unknown) independent set X by making the fewest queries of the form "Is point p covered by an interval in X?" Our interest in this problem stems from two applications: experimental gene discovery with PCR technology and the game of Battleship (in a 1-dimensional setting). We provide adaptive algorithms for both the verification scenario (given an independent set, is it X?) and the discovery scenario (find X without any information). Under some assumptions, these algorithms use an asymptotically optimal number of queries in every instance.