What problems can one solve on a tournament if only its score sequence is known? Tournaments are oriented complete graphs that form an extensively-studied class of directed graphs (digraphs), both from combinatorial and algorithmic perspectives. Over the years, researchers have identified multiple classical digraph problems that can be solved on a tournament from only its score sequence (indegree sequence). These problems include acyclicity testing and topological sorting [Chakrabarti, Ghosh, McGregor, and Vorotnikova; SODA'20], s,t-reachability, strong connectivity, and decomposition into strongly connected components (SCC) [Ghosh and Kuchlous; ESA'24], and vertex-ordering problems such as cutwidth and optimal linear arrangement [Barbero, Paul, and Pilipczuk; ICALP'17]. These prior works showed the sufficiency of the score sequence by designing distinct algorithms for the individual problems. In this work, we give a simple unified framework that solves all these problems using only indegrees and, in fact, completely characterises the class of problems that is determined by the indegree information: problems whose answers are invariant under cycle reversals. As a byproduct of our results, we obtain algorithms for a variety of connectivity-based, cut-based, and vertex-ordering problems on tournaments and almost-tournaments in the streaming, the two-player communication, and the cut-query models of computation. Some of these algorithms match existing optimal bounds and others provide new bounds improving the state of the art. Specifically, our polynomial-time algorithms for almost-tournaments improve upon the exponential-time algorithms of Ghosh and Kuchlous and have much simpler analysis. The said characterisation is a special case of a much more general result that we establish: for any arbitrary digraph, the knowledge of its skeleton (underlying undirected graph) and the vertex indegrees completely determines its properties that are invariant under cycle reversal. In particular, this gives us an O(n²)-cut-query algorithm to solve directed minimum cut on n-node graphs in polynomial time, a significant result that has been observed in the literature but not concretely stated in this form. Our results also unveil interesting general connections between two well-studied sublinear models for graph problems: semi-streaming and cut-query.

The focus of this paper is to increase our understanding of the Longest Processing Time First (LPT) heuristic. LPT is a classical heuristic for the fundamental problem of uniform machine scheduling. For different machine speeds, LPT was first considered by Gonzalez et al (SIAM J. Computing, 1977). Since then, extensive work has been done to improve the approximation factor of the LPT heuristic. However, all known implementations of the LPT heuristic take $O(mn)$ time, where $m$ is the number of machines and $n$ is the number of jobs. In this work, we come up with the first near-linear time implementation for LPT. Specifically, the running time is $O((n+m)(\log^2{m}+\log{n}))$. Somewhat surprisingly, the result is obtained by mapping the problem to dynamic maintenance of lower envelope of lines, which has been well studied in the computational geometry community. Our second contribution is to analyze the performance of LPT for the Drones Warehouse Problem (DWP), which is a natural generalization of the uniform machine scheduling problem motivated by drone-based parcel delivery from a warehouse. In this problem, a warehouse has multiple drones and wants to deliver parcels to several customers. Each drone picks a parcel from the warehouse, delivers it, and returns to the warehouse (where it can also get charged). The speeds and battery lives of the drones could be different, and due to the limited battery life, each drone has a bounded range in which it can deliver parcels. The goal is to assign parcels to the drones so that the time taken to deliver all the parcels is minimized. We prove that the natural approach of solving this problem via the LPT heuristic has an approximation factor of $ϕ$, where $ϕ\approx 1.62$ is the golden ratio.