The Diameter of the Fractional Matching Polytope and Its Hardness Implications
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The (combinatorial) diameter of a polytope P ⊆ ℝ <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">d</sup> is the maximum value of a shortest path between a pair of vertices on the 1-skeleton of P, that is the graph where the nodes are given by the 0-dimensional faces of P, and the edges are given the 1-dimensional faces of P. The diameter of a polytope has been studied from many different perspectives, including a computational complexity point of view. In particular, [Frieze and Teng, 1994] showed that computing the diameter of a polytope is (weakly) NP-hard. In this paper, we show that the problem of computing the diameter is strongly NP-hard even for a polytope with a very simple structure: namely, the fractional matching polytope. We also show that computing a pair of vertices at maximum shortest path distance on the 1-skeleton of this polytope is an APX-hard problem. We prove these results by giving an exact characterization of the diameter of the fractional matching polytope, that is of independent interest.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it