We study some basic algorithmic problems concerning the intersection of tropical hypersurfaces in general dimension: deciding whether this intersection is nonempty, whether it is a tropical variety, and whether it is connected, as well as counting the number of connected components. We characterize the borderline between tractable and hard computations by proving $\mathcal{NP}$-hardness and #$\mathcal{P}$-hardness results under various strong restrictions of the input data, as well as providing polynomial time algorithms for various other restrictions.
This paper proves that when the $r \times r$ minors of an $m \times n$ matrix of indeterminates are not a tropical basis then the tropical prevariety has greater dimension than the tropical variety. It proves the same for the $r \times r$ minors of an $n \times n$ symmetric matrix of indeterminates when r > 4.
In this article, we present a massively parallel framework for computing tropicalizations of algebraic varieties which can make use of finite symmetries. We compute the tropical Grassmannian TGr$_0(3,8)$, and show that it refines the $15$-dimensional skeleton of the Dressian Dr$(3,8)$ with the exception of $23$ special cones for which we construct explicit obstructions to the realizability of their tropical linear spaces. Moreover, we propose algorithms for identifying maximal-dimensional tropical cones which belong to the positive tropicalization. These algorithms exploit symmetries of the tr…
We study the intersection of tropical psi-classes on tropical heavy/light Hassett spaces, generalising a result of Kerber--Markwig for tropical moduli spaces of rational stable curves with distinct marked points. Our computation reveals that the weight of a maximal cone in an intersection has a combinatorial intepretation in terms of the underlying tropical curve and it is always nonnegative. In particular, our result specialises to that, in top dimension, the tropical intersection product coincides with its classical counterpart.
Counts of curves in $\mathbb{P}^1\times\mathbb{P}^1$ with fixed contact order with the toric boundary and satisfying point conditions can be determined with tropical methods by Mikhalkin. If we require that our curves intersect the zero- and infinity-section only in points of contact order $1$, but allow arbitrary contact order for the zero- and infinity-fiber, the corresponding numbers reveal beautiful structural properties such as piecewise polynomiality, similar to the case of double Hurwitz numbers counting covers of $\mathbb{P}^1$ with special ramification profiles over zero and infinity …
Phylogenetic trees are the fundamental mathematical representation of evolutionary processes in biology. They are also objects of interest in pure mathematics, such as algebraic geometry and combinatorics, due to their discrete geometry. Although they are important data structures, they face the significant challenge that sets of trees form a non-Euclidean phylogenetic tree space, which means that standard computational and statistical methods cannot be directly applied. In this work, we explore the statistical feasibility of a pure mathematical representation of the set of all phylogenetic tr…
Mustafin varieties are flat degenerations of projective spaces, induced by a choice of an $n-$tuple of lattices in a vector space over a non-archimedean field. They were introduced by Mustafin in the 70s in order to generalise Mumford's groundbreaking work on the unformisation of curves to higher dimension. These varieties have a rich combinatorial structure as can be seen in pioneering work of Cartwright, Häbich, Sturmfels and Werner. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to Mustafin varieties in terms of images of rational maps, which were studied by Li. Applying tropical intersection t…
We provide geometric methods and algorithms to verify, construct and enumerate pairs of words (of specified length over a fixed $m$-letter alphabet) that form identities in the semigroup $\ut{n}$ of $n\times n$ upper triangular tropical matrices. In the case $n=2$ these identities are precisely those satisfied by the bicyclic monoid, whilst in the case $n=3$ they form a subset of the identities which hold in the plactic monoid of rank $3$. To each word we associate a signature sequence of lattice polytopes, and show that two words form an identity for $\ut{n}$ if and only if their signatures a…