The Complexity of Hex and the Jordan Curve Theorem

Abstract

The Jordan curve theorem and Brouwer's fixed-point theorem are fundamental problems in topology. We study their computational relationship, showing that a stylized computational version of Jordan’s theorem is PPAD-complete, and therefore in a sense computationally equivalent to Brouwer’s theorem. As a corollary, our computational result implies that these two theorems directly imply each other mathematically, complementing Maehara's proof that Brouwer implies Jordan [Maehara, 1984]. We then turn to the combinatorial game of Hex which is related to Jordan's theorem, and where the existence of a winner can be used to show Brouwer's theorem [Gale,1979]. We establish that determining who won an (implicitly encoded) play of Hex is PSPACE-complete by adapting a reduction (due to Goldberg [Goldberg,2015]) from Quantified Boolean Formula (QBF). As this problem is analogous to evaluating the output of a canonical path-following algorithm for finding a Brouwer fixed point - and which is known to be PSPACE-complete [Goldberg/Papadimitriou/Savani, 2013] - we thereby establish a connection between Brouwer, Jordan and Hex higher in the complexity hierarchy.