On the homotopy test on surfaces

Abstract: Let G be a graph cellularly embedded in a surface S. Given two closed walks c and d in G, we take advantage of the RAM model to describe linear time algorithms to decide if c and d are homotopic in S, either freely or with fixed basepoint. We restrict S to be orientable for the free homotopy test, but allow non-orientable surfaces when the basepoint is fixed. After O(|G|) time preprocessing independent of c and d, our algorithms answer the homotopy test in O(|c|+|d|) time, where |G|, |c| and |d| are the respective numbers of edges of G, c and d. As a byproduct we obtain linear time algorithms for the word problem and the conjugacy problem in surface groups. We present a geometric approach based on previous works by Colin de Verdi`ere and Erickson.