Parallel edge detection - graph

Question

I am working on a problem (from Algorithms by Sedgewick, section 4.1, problem 32) to help my understanding, and I have no idea how to proceed.
"Parallel edge detection. Devise a linear-time algorithm to count the parallel edges in a (multi-)graph.
Hint: maintain a boolean array of the neighbors of a vertex, and reuse this array by only reinitializing the entries as needed."
Where two edges are considered to be parallel if they connect the same pair of vertices
Any ideas what to do?

Answer 1

I think we can use BFS for this.
Main idea is to be able to tell if two or more paths exist between two nodes or not, so for this, we can use a set and see if adjacent nodes corresponding to a Node's adjacent list already are in the set.
This uses O(n) extra space but has O(n) time complexity.
boolean bfs(int start){
Queue<Integer> q = new Queue<Integer>(); // get a Queue
boolean[] mark = new boolean[num_of_vertices];
mark[start] = true; // put 1st node into Queue
q.add(start);
while(!q.isEmpty()){
int current = q.remove();
HashSet<Integer> set = new HashSet<Integer>(); /* use a hashset for
storing nodes of current adj. list*/
ArrayList<Integer> adjacentlist= graph.get(current); // get adj. list
for(int x : adjacentlist){
if(set.contains(x){ // if it already had a edge current-->x
return true; // then we have our parallel edge
}
else set.add(x); // if not then we have a new edge
if(!marked[x]){ // normal bfs routine
mark[x]=true;
q.add(x);
}
}
}
}// assumed graph has ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>> representation
// undirected

Answer 2

Assuming that the vertices in your graph are integers 0 .. |V|.
If your graph is directed, edges in the graph are denoted (i, j).
This allows you to produce a unique mapping of any edge to an integer (a hash function) which can be found in O(1).
h(i, j) = i * |V| + j
You can insert/lookup the tuple (i, j) in a hash table in amortised O(1) time. For |E| edges in the adjacency list, this means the total running time will be O(|E|) or linear in the number of edges in the adjacency list.
A python implementation of this might look something like this:
def identify_parallel_edges(adj_list):
# O(n) list of edges to counts
# The Python implementation of tuple hashing implements a more sophisticated
# version of the approach described above, but is still O(1)
edges = {}
for edge in adj_list:
if edge not in edges:
edges[edge] = 0
edges[edge] += 1
# O(n) filter non-parallel edges
res = []
for edge, count in edges.iteritems():
if count > 1:
res.append(edge)
return res
edges = [(1,0),(2,1),(1,0),(3,4)]
print identify_parallel_edges(edges)