resistance-exact
At its defaults it draws resistance to 15 vertices, against an answer that is a ratio of integers. Effective resistance from vertex 0 to every other vertex of the grid 4×4, computed twice in floating point — once by grounding a vertex and eliminating, once by summing (uₖᵢ − uₖⱼ)²/λₖ over the whole spectrum — and once in BigInt rationals, where for an unweighted graph the answer is exactly a ratio of two integers and there is no rounding anywhere. The curves are the relative errors of the two floating-point routes against that exact answer: at worst 4.75·10⁻¹⁶ for the elimination and 9.98·10⁻¹⁶ for the spectral sum, which use no arithmetic in common beyond the matrix they are both handed. Foster's theorem says Σ w·R over the edges is exactly n − 1 whatever the graph is; it comes to 15 against 15.
resistance-exact is one function in lib/figures/graphres.js —
resistance, sparsification and elimination — three routes to one number, and a count that outgrows the format. Everything below came out of it during this build, at
arguments taken from the essays rather than invented for this page. A figure here is the
figure a reader meets in an essay, and if the generator changes, this page changes with it.
At its defaults
Drawn even though every essay passes arguments — which on this site is every essay, at 100% of placements since the standard pass. A default nothing exercises is a trap for the next essay to call this with none, and this is the page where a default that has drifted from the figures around it becomes visible.
Effective resistance from vertex 0 to every other vertex of the grid 4×4, computed twice in floating point — once by grounding a vertex and eliminating, once by summing (uₖᵢ − uₖⱼ)²/λₖ over the whole spectrum — and once in BigInt rationals, where for an unweighted graph the answer is exactly a ratio of two integers and there is no rounding anywhere. The curves are the relative errors of the two floating-point routes against that exact answer: at worst 4.75·10⁻¹⁶ for the elimination and 9.98·10⁻¹⁶ for the spectral sum, which use no arithmetic in common beyond the matrix they are both handed. Foster's theorem says Σ w·R over the edges is exactly n − 1 whatever the graph is; it comes to 15 against 15.
family: "grid", n: 16
The arguments are the ones A count that comes out of a determinant passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
Effective resistance from vertex 0 to every other vertex of the grid 4×4, computed twice in floating point — once by grounding a vertex and eliminating, once by summing (uₖᵢ − uₖⱼ)²/λₖ over the whole spectrum — and once in BigInt rationals, where for an unweighted graph the answer is exactly a ratio of two integers and there is no rounding anywhere. The curves are the relative errors of the two floating-point routes against that exact answer: at worst 4.75·10⁻¹⁶ for the elimination and 9.98·10⁻¹⁶ for the spectral sum, which use no arithmetic in common beyond the matrix they are both handed. Foster's theorem says Σ w·R over the edges is exactly n − 1 whatever the graph is; it comes to 15 against 15.
family: "cycle", n: 16
The arguments are the ones A distance computed by a solve passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
Effective resistance from vertex 0 to every other vertex of the cycle 16, computed twice in floating point — once by grounding a vertex and eliminating, once by summing (uₖᵢ − uₖⱼ)²/λₖ over the whole spectrum — and once in BigInt rationals, where for an unweighted graph the answer is exactly a ratio of two integers and there is no rounding anywhere. The curves are the relative errors of the two floating-point routes against that exact answer: at worst 3.64·10⁻¹⁶ for the elimination and 1.07·10⁻¹⁵ for the spectral sum, which use no arithmetic in common beyond the matrix they are both handed. Foster's theorem says Σ w·R over the edges is exactly n − 1 whatever the graph is; it comes to 15 against 15.
family: "path", n: 12
The arguments are the ones A distance computed by a solve passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
Effective resistance from vertex 0 to every other vertex of the path 12, computed twice in floating point — once by grounding a vertex and eliminating, once by summing (uₖᵢ − uₖⱼ)²/λₖ over the whole spectrum — and once in BigInt rationals, where for an unweighted graph the answer is exactly a ratio of two integers and there is no rounding anywhere. The curves are the relative errors of the two floating-point routes against that exact answer: at worst 0 for the elimination and 4.2·10⁻¹⁵ for the spectral sum, which use no arithmetic in common beyond the matrix they are both handed. Foster's theorem says Σ w·R over the edges is exactly n − 1 whatever the graph is; it comes to 11 against 11.
family: "complete", n: 12
The arguments are the ones A distance computed by a solve passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
Effective resistance from vertex 0 to every other vertex of the complete 12, computed twice in floating point — once by grounding a vertex and eliminating, once by summing (uₖᵢ − uₖⱼ)²/λₖ over the whole spectrum — and once in BigInt rationals, where for an unweighted graph the answer is exactly a ratio of two integers and there is no rounding anywhere. The curves are the relative errors of the two floating-point routes against that exact answer: at worst 6.66·10⁻¹⁶ for the elimination and 5·10⁻¹⁶ for the spectral sum, which use no arithmetic in common beyond the matrix they are both handed. Foster's theorem says Σ w·R over the edges is exactly n − 1 whatever the graph is; it comes to 11 against 11.
family: "grid", n: 20
The arguments are the ones A distance computed by a solve passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
Effective resistance from vertex 0 to every other vertex of the grid 4×5, computed twice in floating point — once by grounding a vertex and eliminating, once by summing (uₖᵢ − uₖⱼ)²/λₖ over the whole spectrum — and once in BigInt rationals, where for an unweighted graph the answer is exactly a ratio of two integers and there is no rounding anywhere. The curves are the relative errors of the two floating-point routes against that exact answer: at worst 7.79·10⁻¹⁶ for the elimination and 1.38·10⁻¹⁵ for the spectral sum, which use no arithmetic in common beyond the matrix they are both handed. Foster's theorem says Σ w·R over the edges is exactly n − 1 whatever the graph is; it comes to 19 against 19.
What it checked while drawing
Every figure above asserted its own claims on the way to being drawn, and a claim that failed
would have failed the build rather than drawn a wrong picture. Those assertions used to leave
no trace at all: a passing one returned true and the only evidence the figure had
checked anything was that nothing crashed. The list below is what they actually said, collected
by running this generator with an observer installed — not a description of
what it is believed to check.
13 distinct claims across 6 sets of arguments, grouped below by shape — because most of them are one sentence with a different number in it, and how many separate times that sentence was put to the test is the informative part.
a connected graph, since resistance between components is infinite
a family the library builds
a graph small enough for the rational route
a graph with at least two vertices
a positive weight
and Foster's identity holds
every endpoint inside the vertex set
Jacobi needs a symmetric matrix
LU is for square matrices
no edge given twice
no self-loop
the grounded solve agrees with the rational answer
two distinct vertices
Against the rule
It draws a decomposition and prints its residual. It calls
resistanceMatrix, resistanceByEig, foster, resistanceExact,
and every figure above carries the badge — which residualcheck verifies by looking
for it in the emitted SVG rather than by finding the call that builds one. A badge that is
constructed and then left out of the body is the failure that check exists for.
Across the library: the rule bites on 214
of 382 generators —
194 print a residual and
20 are exempt with a published reason;
168 factorise nothing.
Read from lib/residual-rule.js, which is the same body the gate enforces from,
and the gate's last check fails the build if this page and it disagree about any generator.
Where it is called
Changing this generator changes every figure on this list. That is what makes the list worth publishing rather than keeping in a check script.
A count that comes out of a determinant
The number of spanning trees of a graph is the determinant of its grounded Laplacian, so it is a whole number known in advance. The elimination that computes it is backward stable at every size — and from sixteen vertices the answer is wrong, because the count has seventeen digits and a binary64 has sixteen.
The matrix that is a graphA distance computed by a solve
Effective resistance is the one quantity in this field with no combinatorial route to it — it is defined by a linear system. On a small unweighted graph the answer is a ratio of two integers, so for once the error is known rather than estimated, and every resistance in a graph has to add up to a number fixed in advance.
The matrix that is a graphA graph with a tenth of the edges
Keeping 344 of 1,225 edges, sampled by effective resistance and reweighted, preserves every eigenvalue of the Laplacian to within a factor of 1.7. It preserves no degree — half of them are wrong by more than a third — and it takes the diameter from one to three.
The matrix that is a graphA preconditioner that is a tree
Every eigenvalue of a tree-preconditioned Laplacian is at least one and at most the total stretch — a combinatorial integer with no arithmetic in it. Measured, the bound is two to four times loose, and on a grid the preconditioner makes the conditioning worse by a factor of 1.85 at every size.
The matrix that is a graphEliminating a vertex is a graph operation
Gaussian elimination on a Laplacian deletes a vertex and joins its neighbours into a clique with conductances wᵢwⱼ over Σw. The matrix that remains is still a graph — symmetric, zero row sums, nonpositive off the diagonal — and the ordering decides whether the fill is thirty-one edges or four hundred and sixty-five.
The matrix that is a graphThe spectrum is not the graph
Two graphs on six vertices with the same Laplacian characteristic polynomial — as integer polynomials, not to fourteen digits. One contains a triangle; the other is bipartite. Every method in this field that reads only the spectrum is answering about the class.