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# [Solved]: Does reachability belong to P?

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Problem Detail:

Reachability is defined as follows: a digraph $G = (V, E)$ and two vertices $v,w \in V$. Is there a directed path from $v$ to $w$ in $G$?

Is it possible to write a polynomial time algorithm for it?

I asked this question on mathematics and got no answer by far.

#### Answered By : Artem Kaznatcheev

Although you already know from the other answers that the question is solvable in polynomial time, I thought I would expand on the computational complexity of reachability since you used complexity terminology in your question.

Reachability (or st-connectivity) in digraphs is the prototypical $NL$-complete problem where $NL$ stands for non-deterministic log space and we use deterministic log-space reductions (although I think it remains complete for $NC^1$ reductions, too).

• To see why it is in $NL$, notice that you can guess a next vertex at every step and verify that it is connected to the previous vertex. A series of correct guesses exists if and only if there is a path from $s$ to $t$.
• To see why is $NL$-hard, notice that the behavior of a non-deterministic Turing machine can be represented by a configuration graph. The nondeterministic machine accepts only if there exists a path from the start configuration to an accept configuration, and if the machine only uses $S(n)$ tape entries then the configuration graph is of size $O(|\Gamma|^{S(n)})$ where $\Gamma$ is the tape alphabet. If $S(n)$ is logarithmic, then the resulting graph is of polynomial size and the result follows.

But I don't have access to a non-deterministic machine, so why should I care? Well, we know lots of things about $NL$; one of those is that is in $P$, which you know from the other answers. However, here are tighter facts that can be useful:

• From Savitch's theorem we know that $NL \subseteq \text{DSPACE}((\log n)^2)$: even on a deterministic machine you don't need that much space to solve the question.

• We know that $NL \subseteq NC^2$: this means that in the circuit model, your question can be solved by a polynomial sized circuit of depth $O((\log n)^2)$. In a more "heuristic" sense, this means that the problem is parallelizable since Nick's Class captures the idea of quick solutions on a parallel computer.

• We know that $NL \subseteq \text{LOGCFL}$ which means that it is not harder (up to log-space reductions) than membership checking in context-free languages which can be a good source of intuition.

Finally, the directed nature of the graph is essential. If the graph is undirected then we believe the question is significantly easier. In particular, undirected st-connectivity is complete for $L$ (deterministic log space) under first-order reductions (Reingold 2004; pdf).