An Adiabatic Quantum Algorithm for Determining Gracefulness of A Graph

Abstract

Graph labelling is one of the noticed contexts in combinatorics and graph theory. Graceful labelling for a graph $G$ with $e$ edges, is to label the vertices of $G$ with $0, 1, \cdots, e$ such that, if we specify to each edge the difference value between its two ends, then any of $1, 2, \cdots, e$ appears exactly once as an edge label. For a given graph, there is still few efficient classical algorithms that determines either it is graceful or not, even for trees - as a well-known class of graphs. In this paper, we introduce an adiabatic quantum algorithm, which for a graceful graph $G$ finds a graceful labelling. Also, this algorithm can determine if $G$ is not graceful. Numerical simulations of the algorithm reveal that its time complexity has a polynomial behaviour with the problem size up to the range of 15 qubits.