In any graph, directed or undirected, there is a straightforward algorithm for finding a widest path once the weight of its minimum-weight edge is known: simply delete all smaller edges and search for any path among the remaining edges using breadth-first search or depth-first search. Based on this test, there also exists a linear time algorithm for finding a widest s-t path in an undirected graph, that does not use the maximum spanning tree. The main idea of the algorithm is to apply the linear-time path-finding algorithm to the median edge weight in the graph, and then either to delete all smaller edges or contract all larger edges according to whether a path does or does not exist, and recurse in the resulting smaller graph.
Fernández, Garfinkel & Arbiol (1998) use undirected bottleneck shortest paths in order to form composite aerial photographs that combine multiple images of overlapping areas. In the subproblem to which the widest path problem applies, two images have already been transformed into a common coordinate system; the remaining task is to select a seam, a curve that passes through the region of overlap and divides one of the two images from the other. Pixels on one side of the seam will be copied from one of the images, and pixels on the other side of the seam will be copied from the other image. Unlike other compositing methods that average pixels from both images, this produces a valid photographic image of every part of the region being photographed. They weigh the edges of a grid graph by a numeric estimate of how visually apparent a seam across that edge would be, and find a bottleneck shortest path for these weights. Using this path as the seam, rather than a more conventional shortest path, causes their system to find a seam that is difficult to discern at all of its points, rather than allowing it to trade off greater visibility in one part of the image for lesser visibility elsewhere.
Berman & Handler (1987) suggest that service vehicles and emergency vehicles should use minimax paths when returning from a service call to their base. In this application, the time to return is less important than the response time if another service call occurs while the vehicle is in the process of returning. By using a minimax path, where the weight of an edge is the maximum travel time from a point on the edge to the farthest possible service call, one can plan a route that minimizes the maximum possible delay between receipt of a service call and arrival of a responding vehicle. Ullah, Lee & Hassoun (2009) use maximin paths to model the dominant reaction chains in metabolic networks; in their model, the weight of an edge is the free energy of the metabolic reaction represented by the edge.
It is possible to find maximum-capacity paths and minimax paths with a single source and single destination very efficiently even in models of computation that allow only comparisons of the input graph's edge weights and not arithmetic on them. The algorithm maintains a set S of edges that are known to contain the bottleneck edge of the optimal path; initially, S is just the set of all m edges of the graph. At each iteration of the algorithm, it splits S into an ordered sequence of subsets S1, S2, ... of approximately equal size; the number of subsets in this partition is chosen in such a way that all of the split points between subsets can be found by repeated median-finding in time O(m). The algorithm then reweights each edge of the graph by the index of the subset containing the edge, and uses the modified Dijkstra algorithm on the reweighted graph; based on the results of this computation, it can determine in linear time which of the subsets contains the bottleneck edge weight. It then replaces S by the subset Si that it has determined to contain the bottleneck weight, and starts the next iteration with this new set S. The number of subsets into which S can be split increases exponentially with each step, so the number of iterations is proportional to the iterated logarithm function, O(log*n), and the total time is O(m log*n). In a model of computation where each edge weight is a machine integer, the use of repeated bisection in this algorithm can be replaced by a list-splitting technique of Han & Thorup (2002), allowing S to be split into O(√m) smaller sets Si in a single step and leading to a linear overall time bound.
A variant of the minimax path problem has also been considered for sets of points in the Euclidean plane. As in the undirected graph problem, this Euclidean minimax path problem can be solved efficiently by finding a Euclidean minimum spanning tree: every path in the tree is a minimax path. However, the problem becomes more complicated when a path is desired that not only minimizes the hop length but also, among paths with the same hop length, minimizes or approximately minimizes the total length of the path. The solution can be approximated using geometric spanners.
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More specifically, the only kind of tie that the Schulze method fails to break is between two candidates who have equally wide paths to each other.
See Jesse Plamondon-Willard, Board election to use preference voting, May 2008; Mark Ryan, 2008 Wikimedia Board Election results, June 2008; 2008 Board Elections, June 2008; and 2009 Board Elections, August 2009. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-May/043134.html
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