We present a polynomial complexity, deterministic, heuristic for solving the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem (HCP) in an undirected graph of order n. Although finding a Hamiltonian cycle is not theoretically guaranteed, we have observed that the heuristic is successful even in cases where such cycles are extremely rare, and it also performs very well on all HCP instances of large graphs listed on the TSPLIB web page. The heuristic owes its name to a visualisation of its iterations. All vertices of the graph are placed on a given circle in some order. The graph's edges are classified as either snakes or ladders, with snakes forming arcs of the circle and ladders forming its chords. The heuristic strives to place exactly n snakes on the circle, thereby forming a Hamiltonian cycle. The Snakes and Ladders Heuristic (SLH) uses transformations inspired by k−opt algorithms such as the, now classical, Lin-Kernighan heuristic to reorder the vertices on the circle in order to transform some ladders into snakes and vice versa. The use of a suitable stopping criterion ensures the heuristic terminates in polynomial time if no improvement is made in n 3 major iterations.

In this paper, we propose a new hybrid algorithm for the Hamiltonian cycle problem by synthesizing the Cross Entropy method and Markov decision processes. In particular, this new algorithm assigns a random length to each arc and alters the Hamiltonian cycle problem to the travelling salesman problem. Thus, there is now a probability corresponding to each arc that denotes the probability of the event "this arc is located on the shortest tour." Those probabilities are then updated as in cross entropy method and used to set a suitable linear programming model. If the solution of the latter yields any tour, the graph is Hamiltonian. Numerical results reveal that when the size of graph is small, say less than 50 nodes, there is a high chance the algorithm will be terminated in its cross entropy component by simply generating a Hamiltonian cycle, randomly. However, for larger graphs, in most of the tests the algorithm terminated in its optimization component (by solving the proposed linear program).

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We consider the famous Hamiltonian cycle problem (HCP) embedded in a Markov decision process (MDP). More specifically, we consider the HCP as an optimisation problem over the space of occupation measures induced by the MDP's stationary policies. In recent years, this approach to the HCP has led to a number of alternative formulations and algorithmic approaches. In this paper, we focus on a specific embedding, because of the work of Feinberg. We present a “branch-and-fix” type algorithm that solves the HCP. At each branch of the algorithm, only a linear program needs to be solved and the dimensions of the successive linear programs are shrinking rather than expanding. Because the nodes of the branch-and-fix tree correspond to specially structured 1-randomised policies, we characterise the latter. This characterisation indicates that the total number of such policies is significantly smaller than the subset of all 1-randomised policies. Finally, we present some numerical results.

We propose a partitioning of the set of unlabelled, connected cubic graphs into two disjoint subsets named genes and descendants, where the cardinality of the descendants is much larger than that of the genes. The key distinction between the two subsets is the presence of special edge cut sets, called crackers, in the descendants. We show that every descendant can be created by starting from a finite set of genes, and introducing the required crackers by special breeding operations. We prove that it is always possible to identify genes that can be used to generate any given descendant, and provide inverse operations that enable their reconstruction. A number of interesting properties of genes may be inherited by the descendant, and we therefore propose a natural algorithm that decomposes a descendant into its ancestor genes. We conjecture that each descendant can only be generated by starting with a unique set of ancestor genes. The latter is supported by numerical experiments.