Chip-firing games on Eulerian digraphs and NP -hardness of computing the rank of a divisor on a graph
Baker and Norine introduced a graph-theoretic analogue of the RiemannRoch 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, even for simple graphs. 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.
chip-firing game riemannroch theory computational complexity eulerian graph