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
graceful. But the computational resource needed in this
approach is still too much to prove the conjecture true.
Let there be any numbers of kp caterpillars each having m vertices and total number of vertices in odd (or even) levels of
these caterpillars are the same. These caterpillars are grouped in k groups each having p caterpillars. Let backbones of
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