Ruby Graph Algo. RGL Guide

Ruby Graph Library

RGL is a framework for graph data structures and algorithms.

The design of the library is much influenced by the Boost Graph Library (BGL)
which is written in C++. Refer to http://www.boost.org/libs/gra... for
further links and documentation on graph data structures and algorithms and
the design rationales of BGL.

A comprehensive summary of graph terminology can be found in the graph section
of the Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures at
http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML... or
Wikipedia.

Documentation

• RGL's API Reference at

  http://rubydoc.info
  

Design principles

This document concentrates on the special issues of the implementation in
Ruby. The main design goals directly taken from the BGL design are:

• An interface for how the structure of a graph can be accessed using a
  generic interface that hides the details of the graph data structure

  1. This interface is defined by the module {RGL::Graph},

  2. should be included in concrete classes.

• A standardized generic interface for traversing graphs
  {RGL::GraphIterator}

RGL provides some general purpose graph classes that conform to this
interface, but they are not meant to be the only graph classes. As in BGL
I believe that the main contribution of the RGL is the formulation of this
interface.

The BGL graph interface and graph components are generic in the sense of the
C++ Standard Template Library (STL). In Ruby other techniques are available to
express the generic character of the algorithms and data structures mainly
using mixins and iterators. The BGL documentation mentions three means to
achieve genericity:

• Algorithm/Data-Structure Interoperability

• Extension through Function Objects and Visitors

• Element Type Parameterization

• Vertex and Edge Property Multi-Parameterization

The first is easily achieved in RGL using mixins, which of course is not as
efficient than C++ templates (but much more readable :-). The second one is
even more easily implemented using standard iterators with blocks or using the
stream module. The third one
is no issue since Ruby is dynamically typed: Each object can be a graph

1. There is no need for a vertex (or even edge type). In the current

2. of RGL properties of vertices are simply attached using hashes. At

first there seems to be not much need for the graph property machinery.

Algorithms

RGL current contains a core set of algorithm patterns:

• Breadth First Search {RGL::BFSIterator}

• Depth First Search {RGL::DFSIterator}

The algorithm patterns by themselves do not compute any meaningful quantities
over graphs, they are merely building blocks for constructing graph

1. The graph algorithms in RGL currently include:

• Topological Sort {RGL::TopsortIterator}

• Connected Components {RGL::Graph#each_connected_component}

• Strongly Connected Components {RGL::Graph#strongly_connected_components}

• Transitive Closure {RGL::Graph#transitive_closure}

• Dijkstras Shortest Path Algorithm {RGL::DijkstraAlgorithm}

• Bellman Ford Algorithm {RGL::BellmanFordAlgorithm}

Data Structures

RGL currently provides two graph classes that implement a generalized
adjacency list and an edge list adaptor.

• {RGL::AdjacencyGraph}

• {RGL::ImplicitGraph}

The AdjacencyGraph class is the general purpose swiss army knife of graph

1. It is highly parameterized so that it can be optimized for different
   situations: the graph is directed or undirected, allow or disallow parallel

edges, efficient access to just the out-edges, fast vertex insertion and
removal at the cost of extra space overhead, etc.

Differences to BGL

The concepts of IncidenceGraph, AdjacencyGraph and VertexListGraph (see
http://www.boost.org/libs/gra... are here bundled in
the base graph module. Most methods of IncidenceGraph should be standard in
the base module Graph. The complexity guarantees can not necessarily provided.
See http://www.boost.org/libs/gra...

Installation

% gem install rgl

or download the latest sources from the git repository
http://github.com/monora/rgl.

If you are going to use the drawing functionalities install Graphviz.

Running tests

Checkout RGL git repository and go to the project directory. First, install
RGL dependencies with bundler:

% bundle install

After that you can run the tests:

% rake test

Example irb session with RGL

irb> require 'rgl/adjacency'
irb> dg=RGL::DirectedAdjacencyGraph[1,2 ,2,3 ,2,4, 4,5, 6,4, 1,6]
# Use DOT to visualize this graph:
irb> require 'rgl/dot'
irb> dg.write_to_graphic_file('jpg')
"graph.jpg"

The result:

irb> dg.directed?
true
irb> dg.vertices
[5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4]
irb> dg.has_vertex? 4
true

Every object could be a vertex (there is no class Vertex), even the class
object Object:

irb> dg.has_vertex? Object
false
irb> dg.edges.sort.to_s
"(1-2)(1-6)(2-3)(2-4)(4-5)(6-4)"
irb> dg.to_undirected.edges.sort.to_s
"(1=2)(1=6)(2=3)(2=4)(5=4)(6=4)"

Add inverse edge (4-2) to directed graph:

irb> dg.add_edge 4,2

(4-2) == (2-4) in the undirected graph:

irb> dg.to_undirected.edges.sort.to_s
"(1=2)(1=6)(2=3)(2=4)(5=4)(6=4)"

(4-2) != (2-4) in directed graphs:

irb> dg.edges.sort.to_s
"(1-2)(1-6)(2-3)(2-4)(4-2)(4-5)(6-4)"
irb> dg.remove_edge 4,2
true

Topological sort is implemented as an iterator:

require 'rgl/topsort'
irb> dg.topsort_iterator.to_a
[1, 2, 3, 6, 4, 5]

A more elaborated example showing implicit graphs:

require 'rgl/implicit'
def module_graph
  RGL::ImplicitGraph.new { |g|
    g.vertex_iterator { |b|
      ObjectSpace.each_object(Module, &b)
    }
    g.adjacent_iterator { |x, b|
      x.ancestors.each { |y|
        b.call(y) unless x == y || y == Kernel || y == Object
      }
    }
    g.directed = true
  }
end

This function creates a directed graph, with vertices being all loaded
modules:

g = module_graph

We only want to see the ancestors of {RGL::AdjacencyGraph}:

require 'rgl/traversal'
tree = g.bfs_search_tree_from(RGL::AdjacencyGraph)

Now we want to visualize this component of g with DOT. We therefore create a
subgraph of the original graph, using a filtered graph:

g = g.vertices_filtered_by {|v| tree.has_vertex? v}
g.write_to_graphic_file('jpg')

creates the following graph image with DOT:

This graph shows all loaded RGL modules:

Look for more in
examples directory.

I collect some links to stuff around RGL at http://del.icio.us/monora/rgl.

Credits

Many thanks to Robert Feldt which also worked on a graph library
(http://rockit.sf.net/subproje... who pointed me to BGL and many other
graph resources.

Robert kindly allowed to integrate his work on graphr, which I did not yet

1. Especially his work to output graphs for
   GraphViz is much more elaborated than the minimal

support in dot.rb.

Jeremy Siek one of the authors of the nice book [The Boost Graph
Library](http://www.boost.org/libs/gra... kindly allowed to use the BGL
documentation as a cheap reference for RGL. He and Robert also gave feedback
and many ideas for RGL.

Dave Thomas for RDoc which generated what you
read and matz for Ruby. Dave included in the latest version of RDoc (alpha9)
the module dot/dot.rb which I use instead of Roberts module to visualize
graphs (see rgl/dot.rb).

Jeremy Bopp, John Carter, Sascha Doerdelmann, Shawn Garbett, Andreas Schörk
and Kirill Lashuk for contributing additions, test cases and bugfixes.

Kirill Lashuk who started to take over further development in November 2012.

See also http://github.com/monora/rgl/...

Copying

RGL is Copyright (c) 2002,2004,2005,2008,2013,2015 by Horst Duchene. It is
free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the
README file of the Ruby distribution.