Tree-width and Logspace: Determinants and Counting Euler Tours

Abstract: Motivated by the recent result of [EJT10] showing that MSO properties are Logspace computable on graphs of bounded tree-width, we consider the complexity of computing the determinant of the adjacency matrix of a bounded tree-width graph and prove that it is L-complete. It is important to notice that the determinant is neither an MSO-property nor counts the number of solutions of an MSO-predicate. We extend this technique to count the number of spanning arborescences and directed Euler tours in bounded tree-width digraphs, and further to counting the number of spanning trees and the number of Euler tours in undirected graphs, all in L. Notice that undirected Euler tours are not known to be MSO-expressible and the corresponding counting problem is in fact #P-hard for general graphs. Counting undirected Euler tours in bounded tree-width graphs was not known to be polynomial time computable till very recently Chebolu et al [CCM13] gave a polynomial time algorithm for this problem (concurrently and independently of this work). Finally, we also show some linear algebraic extensions of the determinant algorithm to show how to compute the charcteristic polynomial and trace of the powers of a bounded tree-width graph in L.