Canadians Should Travel Randomly
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Demaine_Canadians should.pdf
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125.63 KB
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Author(s)
Demaine, Erik D.
Huang, Yamming
Liao, Chung-Shou
Sadakane, Kunihiko
Date Issued
2014
Journal
Automata, Languages, and Programming
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Demaine, Erik D., Yamming Huang, Chung-Shou Liao, and Kunihiko Sadakane. “Canadians Should Travel Randomly.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2014): 380–391.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We study online algorithms for the Canadian Traveller Problem (CTP) introduced by Papadimitriou and Yannakakis in 1991. In this problem, a traveller knows the entire road network in advance, and wishes to travel as quickly as possible from a source vertex s to a destination vertex t, but discovers online that some roads are blocked (e.g., by snow) once reaching them. It is PSPACE-complete to achieve a bounded competitive ratio for this problem. Furthermore, if at most k roads can be blocked, then the optimal competitive ratio for a deterministic online algorithm is 2k + 1, while the only randomized result known is a lower bound of k + 1.
In this paper, we show for the first time that a polynomial time randomized algorithm can beat the best deterministic algorithms, surpassing the 2k + 1 lower bound by an o(1) factor. Moreover, we prove the randomized algorithm achieving a competitive ratio of (1 + [√2 over 2])k + 1 in pseudo-polynomial time. The proposed techniques can also be applied to implicitly represent multiple near-shortest s-t paths.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43948-7_32
