Pivot Gray Codes for the Spanning Trees of a Graph ft. the Fan

Abstract

We consider the problem of listing all spanning trees of a graph G such that successive trees differ by pivoting a single edge around a vertex. Such a listing is called a “pivot Gray code”, and it has more stringent conditions than known “revolving-door” Gray codes for spanning trees. Most revolving-door algorithms employ a standard edge-deletion/edge-contraction recursive approach which we demonstrate presents natural challenges when requiring the “pivot” property. Our main result is the discovery of a greedy strategy to list the spanning trees of the fan graph in a pivot Gray code order. It is the first greedy algorithm for exhaustively generating spanning trees using such a minimal change operation. The resulting listing is then studied to find a recursive algorithm that produces the same listing in O(1)-amortized time using O(n) space. Additionally, we present O(n)-time algorithms for ranking and unranking the spanning trees for our listing. Finally, we discuss how our listing can be applied to find a pivot Gray code for the wheel graph.