How to reduce a strongly connected component to on

Question

From https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/42digraph/

43. Reachable vertex in a digraph. Design a linear-time algorithm to determine whether a digraph has a vertex that is reachable from every other vertex.

Kosaraju-Sharir algorithm gives us the strongly connected components. Java code for that can be seen here. Reducing each SCC to a single vertex, a vertex that has outdegree zero is reachable from every other.

Problem is, everyone seems to be talking about reducing a SCC without providing details. What is an efficient algorithm to do so?

Answer 1

Suppose you already have a method to compute SCCs and the usual graph, vertex and edge methods. Then it's just creating a new graph, adding a vertex representative for each SCC and then adding edge representatives.

For the edges you need to be able to map an original vertex (the edge destination) to its representative in the new graph. You can model that in the first pass using a Map<Vertex, SCC> which maps vertices to their SCCs and a Map<SCC, Vertex> which maps SCCs to their representative vertices in the new graph. Or you directly have a Map<Vertex, Vertex> mapping original vertices to their representatives.

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Here is a Java solution:

public static Graph graphToSccGraph(Graph graph) {
    Collection<SCC> sccs = SccComputation.computeSccs(graph);
    Graph sccGraph = new Graph();

    Map<Vertex, SCC> vertexToScc = new HashMap<>();
    Map<SCC, Vertex> sccToRep = new HashMap<>();

    // Add a representative for each SCC (O(|V|))
    for (SCC scc : sccs) {
        Vertex rep = new Vertex();
        sccGraph.addVertex(rep);

        sccToRep.put(scc, rep);
        for (Vertex vertex : scc.getVertices()) {
            vertexToScc.put(vertex, scc);
        }
    }

    // Add edge representatives (O(|E|))
    for (Vertex vertex : graph.getVertices()) {
        Vertex sourceRep = sccToRep.get(vertexToScc.get(vertex));
        for (Edge edge : vertex.getOutgoingEdges()) {
           Vertex destRep = sccToRep.get(vertexToScc.get(edge.getDestination()));
           Edge edgeRep = new Edge(sourceRep, destRep);
              if (!sccGraph.contains(edgeRep)) {
                  sccGraph.addEdge(edgeRep);
              }
        }
    }

    return sccGraph;
}

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Time complexity is linear in the size of the graph (amount of vertices and edges), so optimal. That is Theta(|V| + |E|).

Usually people use a Union-Find (see Wikipedia) data-structure to make this even simpler and get rid of the Maps.

Answer 2

Following is a Java solution to my own question. For the graph representation, it uses edu.princeton.cs:algs4:1.0.3 from https://github.com/kevin-wayne/algs4. There appears to be general algorithms for graph contraction, as outlined in this paper; however, for my purposes, the following is sufficient.

/**
 * 43. <b>Reachable vertex.</b>
 * <p>
 * DAG: Design a linear-time algorithm to determine whether a DAG has a vertex that is reachable from every other
 * vertex, and if so, find one.
 * Digraph: Design a linear-time algorithm to determine whether a digraph has a vertex that is reachable from every
 * other vertex, and if so, find one.
 * <p>
 * Answer:
 * DAG: Consider an edge (u, v) ∈ E. Since the graph is acyclic, u is not reachable from v.
 * Thus u cannot be the solution to the problem. From this it follows that only a vertex of
 * outdegree zero can be a solution. Furthermore, there has to be exactly one vertex with outdegree zero,
 * or the problem has no solution. This is because if there were multiple vertices with outdegree zero,
 * they wouldn't be reachable from each other.
 * <p>
 * Digraph: Reduce the graph to it's Kernel DAG, then find a vertex of outdegree zero.
 */
public class Scc {
    private final Digraph g;
    private final Stack<Integer> s = new Stack<>();
    private final boolean marked[];
    private final Digraph r;
    private final int[] scc;
    private final Digraph kernelDag;

    public Scc(Digraph g) {
        this.g = g;
        this.r = g.reverse();
        marked = new boolean[g.V()];
        scc = new int[g.V()];
        Arrays.fill(scc, -1);

        for (int v = 0; v < r.V(); v++) {
            if (!marked[v]) visit(v);
        }

        int i = 0;
        while (!s.isEmpty()) {
            int v = s.pop();

            if (scc[v] == -1) visit(v, i++);
        }
        Set<Integer> vPrime = new HashSet<>();
        Set<Map.Entry<Integer, Integer>> ePrime = new HashSet<>();

        for (int v = 0; v < scc.length; v++) {
            vPrime.add(scc[v]);
            for (int w : g.adj(v)) {
                // no self-loops, no parallel edges
                if (scc[v] != scc[w]) {
                    ePrime.add(new SimpleImmutableEntry<>(scc[v], scc[w]));
                }
            }
        }
        kernelDag = new Digraph(vPrime.size());
        for (Map.Entry<Integer, Integer> e : ePrime) kernelDag.addEdge(e.getKey(), e.getValue());
    }

    public int reachableFromAllOther() {
        for (int v = 0; v < kernelDag.V(); v++) {
            if (kernelDag.outdegree(v) == 0) return v;
        }
        return -1;
    }

    // reverse postorder
    private void visit(int v) {
        marked[v] = true;

        for (int w : r.adj(v)) {
            if (!marked[w]) visit(w);
        }
        s.push(v);
    }

    private void visit(int v, int i) {
        scc[v] = i;

        for (int w : g.adj(v)) {
            if (scc[w] == -1) visit(w, i);
        }
    }
}

Running it on the graph below produces the strongly-connected components as shown. Vertex 0 in the reduced DAG is reachable from every other vertex.

What I couldn't find anywhere is the kind of detail that I presented above. Comments like "well, this is easy, you do that, then you do something else" are thrown around without concrete details.