$\tilde{O}(1)$-Depth Parallel Reachability Faster than Transitive Closure

Abstract

A $d$-shortcut of a directed graph $G=(V,E)$ is a subset of edges drawn from the transitive closure $TC(G)$ whose addition reduces the graph diameter to at most $d$. In the special case $d=1$, computing a $1$-shortcut is \emph{equivalent} to computing the transitive closure. For larger values of $d$, a lower bound of [Hesse, SODA 2003] shows that $n^{\delta }$-shortcuts, for small constants $\delta >0$, may still contain a large fraction of the edges of $TC(G)$, suggesting that shortcut construction may remain as hard as transitive closure even in this regime. Consequently, since $\tilde{O}(d)$-depth parallel reachability algorithms rely on computing $d$-shortcuts, achieving $\tilde{O}(1)$ depth by this approach has so far required computing the full transitive closure. Assuming $\omega =2$, the PS-AE-Triangle hypothesis of [Abboud, Bringmann, Fischer, and Künnemann, SODA 2024] yields a conditional $T^{4/3-o(1)}$ time barrier for computing transitive closure when $T\le n^{3/2}$, where $T=|TC(G)|$. In this work, we bypass the transitive-closure barrier for $\tilde{O}(1)$-depth parallel reachability. We introduce randomized $d$-shortcut constructions that already circumvent this barrier for $d=3$ and, more generally, for every even $d\ge 4$ up to $O(\log n)$. Our approach yields a randomized $\tilde{O}(1)$-depth parallel reachability algorithm with total work $\tilde{O}(T^{\omega /2})$, which becomes $\tilde{O}(T)$ when $\omega =2$, falling below this conditional $T^{4/3-o(1)}$ barrier throughout that regime. Under the current bound of $\omega$, this gives $\tilde{O}(T^{1.186})$ work, improving on the current $T^{1.3459+o(1)}$ sequential-time bound for transitive closure due to Abboud et al. Thus, although $\tilde{O}(1)$-shortcuts might be almost as dense as the full transitive closure, they can nevertheless be computed substantially faster.

Accepted to FOCS 2026