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Eulerian Tour |
Sample Problem: Riding The Fences
Farmer John owns a large number of fences, which he must periodically check for integrity. Farmer John keeps track of his fences by maintaining a list of their intersection points, along with the fences which end at each point. Each fence has two end points, each at an intersection point, although the intersection point may be the end point of only a single fence. Of course, more than two fences might share an endpoint.
Given the fence layout, calculate if there is a way for Farmer John to ride his horse to all of his fences without riding along a fence more than once. Farmer John can start and end anywhere, but cannot cut across his fields (the only way he can travel between intersection points is along a fence). If there is a way, find one way.
The Abstraction
Given: An undirected graph
Find a path which uses every edge exactly once. This is called an Eulerian tour. If the path begins and ends at the same vertex, it is called a Eulerian circuit.
The Algorithm
Detecting whether a graph has an Eulerian tour or circuit is actually easy; two different rules apply.
- A graph has an Eulerian circuit if and only if it is connected (once you throw out all nodes of degree 0) and every node has `even degree'.
- A graph has an Eulerian path if and only if it is connected and every node except two has even degree.
- In the second case, one of the two nodes which has odd degree must be the start node, while the other is the end node.
The basic idea of the algorithm is to start at some node the graph and determine a circuit back to that same node. Now, as the circuit is added (in reverse order, as it turns out), the algorithm ensures that all the edges of all the nodes along that path have been used. If there is some node along that path which has an edge that has not been used, then the algorithm finds a circuit starting at that node which uses that edge and splices this new circuit into the current one. This continues until all the edges of every node in the original circuit have been used, which, since the graph is connected, implies that all the edges have been used, so the resulting circuit is Eulerian.
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