A Heuristic for the Maximum Independent Set Problem Based on Optimization of a Quadratic Over a Sphere

For a given graph the maximum independent set problem is to find a maximum subset of vertices no two of which are adjacent. We propose a heuristic for the maximum independent set problem which utilizes classical results for the problem of optimization of a quadratic function over a sphere. The efficiency of the approach is confirmed by results of numerical experiments on DIMACS benchmarks.

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