Graceful Labeling of Trees

Mohd. Momin Al Aziz, Forhad Hossain, Dr. M. Kaykobad

Problem Specification New classes of Graceful trees

 A tree on m edges is said to be graceful if the vertices We have developed two new classes of tree which were not proved to be graceful yet. It’s a combination of
are labeled using 0,1,2,…,m where each edge label is caterpillars under specific conditions called super-caterpillars and extended super-caterpillars.
distinct.
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1. Super caterpillar
6 5 Let T0 be any arbitrary caterpillar and Ti, i = 1,…,k be cater-pillars with |Ti|=m number of vertices and sum total of vertices is
the same in odd levels of all pairs T2i+1 and T2i+2. In case k being an odd number, one caterpillar will be without a pair. Let
one end of each backbone be joined to the vertex v by an edge. Then the resulting tree is called a super-caterpillar.

0 1 3 4 0

Figure: Graceful labeling on a complete binary tree with m=6.

The problem originated in 1960’s by Alex Rosa, G.S. 20 30

Golomb from the famous Kotzig-Ringel conjecture. Since 50 40
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then new classes of trees are proved to be graceful.

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Approach 42
There are two different approach to solve this problem:
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1. Finding new class of trees: Mathematicians have 9 18 17
found many trees (i.e caterpillar, spider, stars, symmetric 7 6 8
trees) to have graceful property. We are working on the
same approach. 22
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Figure: Super-caterpillar gracefully labeled 26 25

Figure: A Caterpillar with 10 vertices gracefully labeled

We have proved two new classes of trees to be proved

graceful with similar algorithm.

2. AI approach: By applying constraints and methods of AI 2. Extended Super caterpillar

we can gracefully label any tree. The recent effort in this
method has proved that a tree with 35vertices are Let there be any numbers of kp caterpillars each having m vertices and total number of vertices in odd (or even) levels of
graceful. But the computational resource needed in this these caterpillars are the same. These caterpillars are grouped in k groups each having p caterpillars. Let backbones of
approach is still too much to prove the conjecture true. each group i caterpillars be connected to vertex vi that is connected to vertex v. Then the resulting tree is called a
extended super-caterpillar.

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Figure: Computationally prove a tree to be graceful.
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This approach uses Deterministic Backtracking and

Probabilistic Search to solve trees with 35 vertices. We 7 6
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know that the number of trees with n vertices grows
exponentially with n. An empirical relation is O(2.6687^n).
So computational power needed for verification also Figure: Extended Super-caterpillar gracefully labeled
grows exponentially.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), BUET