I wrote a code segment to determine the longest path in a graph. Following is the code. But I don't know how to get the computational complexity in it because of the recursive method in the middle. Since finding the longest path is an NP complete problem I assume it's something like O(n!)
or O(2^n)
, but how can I actually determine it?
public static int longestPath(int A) {
int k;
int dist2=0;
int max=0;
visited[A] = true;
for (k = 1; k <= V; ++k) {
if(!visited[k]){
dist2= length[A][k]+longestPath(k);
if(dist2>max){
max=dist2;
}
}
}
visited[A]=false;
return(max);
}
Your recurrence relation is T(n, m) = mT(n, m-1) + O(n)
, where n
denotes number of nodes and m
denotes number of unvisited nodes (because you call longestPath
m
times, and there is a loop which executes the visited test n
times). The base case is T(n, 0) = O(n)
(just the visited test).
Solve this and I believe you get T(n, n) is O(n * n!).
EDIT
Working:
T(n, n) = nT(n, n-1) + O(n)
= n((n-1)T(n, n-2) + O(n)) + O(n) = ...
= n(n-1)...1T(n, 0) + O(n)(1 + n + n(n-1) + ... + n(n-1)...2)
= O(n)(1 + n + n(n-1) + ... + n!)
= O(n)O(n!) (see http://oeis.org/A000522)
= O(n*n!)