CMSC/AMSC 660-001 Fall 2004 Final Project

Definition: An independent set (IS) of a graph is a set of vertices of the graph that have no edges in common. The number of vertices in the set gives the cardinality of the IS and the IS with the maximum cardinality is called the maximum (or maximal) independent set (MIS) of the graph. Note that in general, the solution may not be unique, i.e. there could be more than one MIS in a graph (depending on its structure). In this assignment, however, we are concerned with finding any one MIS. Also note that the problem of finding the MIS of a graph is a classical graph theory problem and its complexity is known to be NP-Complete [1].