A Novel Method for Counting Independent Sets in a Grid Graph

Abstract

The problem of counting independent sets of a graph G is not only mathematically relevant and interesting, but also has many applications in physics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science. In this paper, a novel method for counting independent sets on grid-like structures is presented. It starts by explaining the recurrences used by the method to count independent sets on basic topologies of graphs. The method is extended to process grid-like structures of quadratic faces. The proposal has a lower time complexity than the required on the leading and current method based on the transfer matrix for counting independent sets on grids.