The Graph Isomorphism Problem

The graph isomorphism problem can be easily stated: check to see if two graphs that look differently are actually the same. The problem occupies a rare position in the world of complexity theory, it is clearly in NP but is not known to be in P and it is not known to be NP-complete. Many sub-disciplines of mathematics, such as topology theory and group theory, can be brought to bear on the problem, and yet only for special classes of graphs have polynomial-time algorithms been discovered. Incongruently, this problem seems very easy in practice. It is almost always trivial to check two random graphs for isomorphism, and fast hardware implementations exists for application domains such as image processing. This paper is mostly a survey of related work in the graph isomorphism field. We examine the problem from many angles, mirroring the multifaceted nature of the literature. We survey complexity results for the graph isomorphism problem, and discuss some of the classes of graphs which hav...