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Initial Sorting of Vertices in the Maximum Clique Problem Reviewed
In recent years there have been a number of important improvements in exact color-based maximum clique solvers, which have considerably enhanced their performance. Initial vertex ordering is one strategy known to have a significant impact on the size of the search tree. Typically, a degenerate sorting by minimum degree is used; literature also reports different tiebreaking strategies. A systematic study of the impact of initial sorting in the light of new cutting-edge ideas (e.g. recoloring [8], selective coloring [13], ILS initial lower bound computation [15, 16] or MaxSAT-based pruning [14]) is, however, lacking. This paper presents a new initial sorting procedure and relates performance to the new mentioned variants implemented in leading solver BBMC [9, 10].