Volume 11 (2015) Article 2 pp. 35-57

The Complexity of Parity Graph Homomorphism: An Initial Investigation

by John Faben and Mark Jerrum

Received: September 8, 2013
Revised: March 2, 2015
Published: March 14, 2015

$\def\parityP{\oplus\mathrm{P}}$

Given a graph $G$, we investigate the problem of determining the parity of the number of homomorphisms from $G$ to some other fixed graph $H$. We conjecture that this problem exhibits a complexity dichotomy, such that all parity graph homomorphism problems are either polynomial-time solvable or $\parityP$--complete, and provide a conjectured characterisation of the easy cases.

We show that the conjecture is true for the restricted case in which the graph $H$ is a tree, and provide some tools that may be useful in further investigation into the parity graph homomorphism problem, and the problem of counting homomorphisms for other moduli.

DOI: 10.4086/toc.2015.v011a002

© 2015 John Faben and Mark Jerrum
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY)