Chip-firing games on Eulerian digraphs and NP-hardness of computing the rank of a divisor on a graph

Abstract

Baker and Norine introduced a graph-theoretic analogue of the Riemann-Roch theory. A central notion in this theory is the rank of a divisor. In this paper we prove that computing the rank of a divisor on a graph is NP-hard. The determination of the rank of a divisor can be translated to a question about a chip-firing game on the same underlying graph. We prove the NP-hardness of this question by relating chip-firing on directed and undirected graphs.