L. Kirby and J. Paris introduced the Hercules and Hydra game on rooted trees as a natural example of an undecidable statement in Peano Arithmetic. One can show that Hercules has a “short” strategy (he wins in a primitively recursive number of moves) and also a “long” strategy (the finiteness of the game cannot be proved in Peano Arithmetic). We investigate the conflict of the “short” and “long” intentions (a problem suggested by J. Nešetřil). After each move of Hercules (trying to kill Hydra fast)...

The notion of treewidth is of considerable interest in relation to NP-hard problems. Indeed, several studies have shown that the tree-decomposition method can be used to solve many basic optimization problems in polynomial time when treewidth is bounded, even if, for arbitrary graphs, computing the treewidth is NP-hard. Several papers present heuristics with computational experiments. For many graphs the discrepancy between the heuristic results and the best lower bounds is still very large. The...

The notion of treewidth is of considerable interest in relation to NP-hard problems. Indeed, several studies have shown that the tree-decomposition method can be used to solve many basic optimization problems in polynomial time when treewidth is bounded, even if, for arbitrary graphs, computing the treewidth is NP-hard. Several papers present heuristics with computational experiments. For many graphs the discrepancy between the heuristic results and the best lower bounds is still very large....

Let $T_1,\cdots ,T_d$ be homogeneous trees with degrees $q_1+1,\cdots ,q_d+1\ge 3$, respectively. For each tree, let $𝔥:T_j\to \mathbb{Z}$ be the Busemann function with respect to a fixed boundary point (end). Its level sets are the horocycles. The horocyclic product of $T_1,\cdots ,T_d$ is the graph $\mathrm{𝖣𝖫}(q_1,\cdots ,q_d)$ consisting of all $d$-tuples $x_1\cdots x_d\in T_1\times \cdots \times T_d$ with $𝔥\left(x_1\right)+\cdots +𝔥\left(x_d\right)=0$, equipped with a natural neighbourhood relation. In the present paper, we explore the geometric, algebraic, analytic and probabilistic properties of these graphs and their isometry groups. If $d=2$ and $q_1=q_2=q$ then we obtain a Cayley graph of the...