CSE 101 Homework 2
Winter 2021
This homework is due on gradescope Friday January 29th at 11:59pm pacific time. Remember to justify
your work even if the problem does not explicitly say so. Writing your solutions in LATEXis recommend
though not required.
Question 1 (Marble Run, 35 points). Connie is building a marble run. She has built a complicated downhill,
branching track for marbles to run along represented by a DAG G. When a marble hits a vertex of this graph
that it not a leaf, it will travel along a random one of the outgoing edges. With some experimentation, Connie
has computed for each vertex the probability that the marble will leave through each of its outgoing edges.
Give an algorithm that given G, these probabilities and the vertex s where the marble starts, computes
for each vertex v of G, the probability p(v) that a marble running through this course will at some point pass
through v. For full credit, your algorithm should run in linear time. Hint: Compute the values of p(v) one
at a time in an appropriate order.
Question 2 (Contracting Cycles, 20 points). Consider the following method of computing the metagraph of
a graph G. If G is a DAG, return G. Otherwise, find some cycle C in G and let G′ be the graph obtained
from G by replacing all of the vertices of C with a single vertex with edges to/from the same vertices that have
edges from/to some vertex of C. Then recursively compute the metagraph of G′. Prove that this algorithm
correctly computes the metagraph.
Question 3 (Graph Cycle, 15 points). Is it the case that for every finite, strongly connected directed graph
G that there is a cycle that visits each vertex of G at least once, but uses no edge more than once? Prove or
provide a counter-example.
Question 4 (Dijkstra at Small Distances, 30 points). Suppose that you are given a graph G with positive
integer edge weights, a vertex s and an integer L. Give an algorithm that determines which other vertices
w in G have paths from s to w of length at most L. For full credit your algorithm should run in time
O(|V | + |E| + L). Hint: You will want to devise some appropriate modification of Dijkstra’s algorithm that
takes advantage of the fact that you only need to keep track of distances that are less than L.
Question 5 (Extra credit, 1 point). Approximately how much time did you spend working on this homework?
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