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Why a graph with one vertex and no edge considered strongly connected?

asked 2017-12-05 08:52:49 +0200

Sébastien gravatar image

Everytime I need to use the strongly connected components of a graph in Sage, I am looking for a graph where there exists a biinfinite path going trough all the vertices of a components infinitely often. In that sense, I dislike the behavior of the methods is_strongly_connected and strongly_connected_components.

More precisely, I agree with this:

sage: G = DiGraph(loops=True)
sage: G.add_edge((0,0))
sage: G.is_strongly_connected()
True

I dislike that this is not returning False:

sage: G = DiGraph()
sage: G.add_vertex(0)
sage: G.is_strongly_connected()
True

and I dislike that strongly_connected_components method and its friends always return a lot of garbage components containing one vertex with no loops where no biinfinite path can live in:

sage: G = DiGraph()
sage: G.add_edges([(i,i+1) for i in range(9)])
sage: G.add_edge(9,6)
sage: G.strongly_connected_components()
[[6, 7, 8, 9], [5], [4], [3], [2], [1], [0]]
sage: G.strongly_connected_components_subgraphs()
[Subgraph of (): Digraph on 4 vertices,
 Subgraph of (): Digraph on 1 vertex,
 Subgraph of (): Digraph on 1 vertex,
 Subgraph of (): Digraph on 1 vertex,
 Subgraph of (): Digraph on 1 vertex,
 Subgraph of (): Digraph on 1 vertex,
 Subgraph of (): Digraph on 1 vertex]

Do you think like me that the definition should be changed to :

sage: [sub for sub in G.strongly_connected_components_subgraphs() if sub.num_edges()]
[Subgraph of (): Digraph on 4 vertices]

?

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answered 2017-12-05 11:02:19 +0200

tmonteil gravatar image

updated 2017-12-06 14:59:57 +0200

slelievre gravatar image

Note that if you remove the "biinfinite", there is no problem, because of the empty path. Usually, when we speak about "components", we expect to get a partition of the ground set, your definition breaks that. I do understand the behaviour you expect, but imho, it should be at most an option, definitely not the default, the default should be what is expected by an average graph theorist.

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Asked: 2017-12-05 08:52:49 +0200

Seen: 318 times

Last updated: Dec 06 '17