R igraph manual pages

Girth of a graph

Description

The girth of a graph is the length of the shortest circle in it.

Usage

girth(graph, circle = TRUE)

Arguments

graph	The input graph. It may be directed, but the algorithm searches for undirected circles anyway.
circle	Logical scalar, whether to return the shortest circle itself.

Details

The current implementation works for undirected graphs only, directed graphs are treated as undirected graphs. Loop edges and multiple edges are ignored. If the graph is a forest (ie. acyclic), then zero is returned.

This implementation is based on Alon Itai and Michael Rodeh: Finding a minimum circuit in a graph Proceedings of the ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, 1-10, 1977. The first implementation of this function was done by Keith Briggs, thanks Keith.

Value

A named list with two components:

girth	Integer constant, the girth of the graph, or 0 if the graph is acyclic.
circle	Numeric vector with the vertex ids in the shortest circle.

Author(s)

Gabor Csardi csardi.gabor@gmail.com

References

Alon Itai and Michael Rodeh: Finding a minimum circuit in a graph Proceedings of the ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, 1-10, 1977

Examples

# No circle in a tree
g <- make_tree(1000, 3)
girth(g)

# The worst case running time is for a ring
g <- make_ring(100)
girth(g)

# What about a random graph?
g <- sample_gnp(1000, 1/1000)
girth(g)

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