Weak embeddings of posets to the Boolean lattice

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to prove that several variants of deciding whether a poset can be (weakly) embedded into a small Boolean lattice, or to a few consecutive levels of a Boolean lattice, are NP-complete, answering a question of Griggs and of Patkos. As an equivalent reformulation of one of these problems, we also derive that it is NP-complete to decide whether a given graph can be embedded to the two middle levels of some hypercube.