Skip to main content

Generating Trees

Tree generation is a well known (and solved!) problem in computer science. On the other hand, it's pretty important for various problems - in my case, making tree-like fusanes. I'll describe here the slightly tortuous route I took to make trees.

Firstly, there is a famous theorem due to Cayley that the number of (labelled) trees on n vertices is nn - 2 which can be proved by using Prüfer sequences. That's all very well, you might well say - but what does all this mean?

Well, it's not all that important, since there is a fundamental problem with this approach : the difference between a labelled tree and an unlabelled tree. There are many more labeled trees than unlabeled :


There is only one unlabeled tree on 3 vertices, but 3 labeled ones

this is easy to check using the two OEIS sequences for this : A000272 (labeled) and A000055 (unlabeled). For n ranging from 3 to 8 we have [3, 16, 125, 1296, 16807, 262144] labeled trees and [1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 23] unlabeled ones. Only 23 unique trees on 8 vertices out of 262,144 labelled ones is quite a ratio!

Having said all that, there is code here to generate such trees, with test code here. As always, the algorithms are taken from CAGES.

Far better than generating labelled trees and filtering out isomorphic ones would be to only generate non-isomorphic trees in the first place. For this, I found a paper here - a report, really but one written in a way I could understand (thanks Michael Dinneen!). It describes an algorithm due to Wright, Richmond, Odlyzko and McKay (WROM) which is described here.

As a result, here are all the 11 unlabelled trees on 7 vertices:
Please don't be confused by the fact that they actually have labels...

(As an aside, this tree-drawing algorithm doesn't work very well for 'twig' branches like the tree on the lower left).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Adamantane, Diamantane, Twistane

After cubane, the thought occurred to look at other regular hydrocarbons. If only there was some sort of classification of chemicals that I could use look up similar structures. Oh wate, there is . Anyway, adamantane is not as regular as cubane, but it is highly symmetrical, looking like three cyclohexanes fused together. The vertices fall into two different types when colored by signature: The carbons with three carbon neighbours (degree-3, in the simple graph) have signature (a) and the degree-2 carbons have signature (b). Atoms of one type are only connected to atoms of another - the graph is bipartite . Adamantane connects together to form diamondoids (or, rather, this class have adamantane as a repeating subunit). One such is diamantane , which is no longer bipartite when colored by signature: It has three classes of vertex in the simple graph (a and b), as the set with degree-3 has been split in two. The tree for signature (c) is not shown. The graph is still bipartite accordin

Király's Method for Generating All Graphs from a Degree Sequence

After posting about the Hakimi-Havel  theorem, I received a nice email suggesting various relevant papers. One of these was by Zoltán Király  called " Recognizing Graphic Degree Sequences and Generating All Realizations ". I have now implemented a sketch of the main idea of the paper, which seems to work reasonably well, so I thought I would describe it. See the paper for details, of course. One focus of Király's method is to generate graphs efficiently , by which I mean that it has polynomial delay. In turn, an algorithm with 'polynomial delay' takes a polynomial amount of time between outputs (and to produce the first output). So - roughly - it doesn't take 1s to produce the first graph, 10s for the second, 2s for the third, 300s for the fourth, and so on. Central to the method is the tree that is traversed during the search for graphs that satisfy the input degree sequence. It's a little tricky to draw, but looks something like this: At the top

1,2-dichlorocyclopropane and a spiran

As I am reading a book called "Symmetry in Chemistry" (H. H. Jaffé and M. Orchin) I thought I would try out a couple of examples that they use. One is 1,2-dichlorocylopropane : which is, apparently, dissymmetric because it has a symmetry element (a C2 axis) but is optically active. Incidentally, wedges can look horrible in small structures - this is why: The box around the hydrogen is shaded in grey, to show the effect of overlap. A possible fix might be to shorten the wedge, but sadly this would require working out the bounds of the text when calculating the wedge, which has to be done at render time. Oh well. Another interesting example is this 'spiran', which I can't find on ChEBI or ChemSpider: Image again courtesy of JChempaint . I guess the problem marker (the red line) on the N suggests that it is not a real compound? In any case, some simple code to determine potential chiral centres (using signatures) finds 2 in the cyclopropane structure, and 4 in the