Compression with wildcards: All spanning trees with prescribed vertex-degrees

Abstract

By processing all minimal cutsets of a graph G, and by using novel wildcards, all spanning trees of G can be compactly encoded. Surprisingly, a 1986 algorithm of Winter seems to achieve (Conjecture 2) exactly the same compression, although in totally unrelated ways! Although Winter's algorithm is faster, our method adapts to relevant variations of the task, e.g. to the enumeration of only those spanning trees that obey prescribed degree conditions