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Showing posts from June, 2012

Havel-Hakimi Algorithm for Generating Graphs from Degree Sequences

A degree sequence is an ordered list of degree s for the vertices of a graph. For example, here are some graphs and their degree sequences: Clearly, each graph has only one degree sequence, but the reverse is not true - one degree sequence can correspond to many graphs. Finally, an ordered sequence of numbers (d1 >= d2 >= ... >= dn > 0) may not be the degree sequence of a graph - in other words, it is not graphical . The Havel-Hakimi (HH) theorem gives us a way to test a degree sequence to see if it is graphical or not. As a side-effect, a graph is produced that realises the sequence. Note that it only produces one graph, not all of them. It proceeds by attaching the first vertex of highest degree to the next set of high-degree vertices. If there are none left to attach to, it has either used up all the sequence to produce a graph, or the sequence was not graphical. The image above shows the HH algorithm at work on the sequence [3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1]. Unfortunat