R. Krithika ; Roohani Sharma ; Prafullkumar Tale - The Complexity of Contracting Bipartite Graphs into Small Cycles

dmtcs:14658 - Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, December 3, 2025, vol. 27:3 - https://doi.org/10.46298/dmtcs.14658
The Complexity of Contracting Bipartite Graphs into Small CyclesArticle

Authors: R. Krithika ; Roohani Sharma ; Prafullkumar Tale

    For a positive integer $\ell \geq 3$, the $C_\ell$-Contractibility problem takes as input an undirected simple graph $G$ and determines whether $G$ can be transformed into a graph isomorphic to $C_\ell$ (the induced cycle on $\ell$ vertices) using only edge contractions. Brouwer and Veldman [JGT 1987] showed that $C_4$-Contractibility is NP-complete in general graphs. It is easy to verify that $C_3$-Contractibility is polynomial-time solvable. Dabrowski and Paulusma [IPL 2017] showed that $C_{\ell}$-Contractibility is \NP-complete\ on bipartite graphs for $\ell = 6$ and posed as open problems the status of the problem when $\ell$ is 4 or 5. In this paper, we show that both $C_5$-Contractibility and $C_4$-Contractibility are NP-complete on bipartite graphs.


    Volume: vol. 27:3
    Section: Graph Theory
    Published on: December 3, 2025
    Accepted on: November 23, 2025
    Submitted on: November 1, 2024
    Keywords: Computational Complexity

    Consultation statistics

    This page has been seen 10 times.
    This article's PDF has been downloaded 4 times.