CS 218 Tutorial-6

1. Let G be a graph. A clique of G is a set of vertices such that any two

vertices in the set are joined by an edge. Show that the problem of
deciding if a graph has a clique of size k is NP-complete.

2. Given a set A = {a1 , . . . , an }, a collection {B1 , B2 , . . . Bm } of subsets of

A and a number k, we want to decide if there exists a subset H of A of
size at most k such that H ∩ Bi 6= ∅ for all i.
Show that this problem is NP-complete.

3. Consider the following decision problem DISJOINT:

Input: A set S, a collection C = {S1 , S2 , . . . , Sm } of subsets of S and an
integer k.
Output: YES iff there are at least k pair-wise disjoint subsets in C.
Show that INDEPENDENT-SET ≤p DISJOINT and DISJOINT ≤p
INDEPENDENT-SET.

4. Show that finding a maximum independent set in a graph G is polynomial-

time reducible to the decision version (called INDEPENDENT-SET in
class) of the independent set problem.

5. Consider the following version of the Independent Set Problem. Given

an undirected graph G and a number k, is there a subset of at least k
vertices in G such that there is no path of length at most 2 between any
two vertices in the subset.
Prove that this problem is also NP-complete.