Exploiting Sparsity for Bipartite Hamiltonicity

We present a Monte Carlo algorithm that detects the presence of a Hamiltonian cycle in an n-vertex undirected bipartite graph of average degree delta >= 3 almost surely and with no false positives, in (2-2^{1-delta})^{n/2}poly(n) time using only polynomial space. With the exception of cubic graphs, this is faster than the best previously known algorithms. Our method is a combination of a variant of Björklund's 2^{n/2}poly(n) time Monte Carlo algorithm for Hamiltonicity detection in bipartite graphs, SICOMP 2014, and a simple fast solution listing algorithm for very sparse CNF-SAT formulas