Dijkstra's algorithm with negative weights

Question

Can we use Dijkstra's algorithm with negative weights?

STOP! Before you think "lol nub you can just endlessly hop between two points and get an infinitely cheap path", I'm more thinking of one-way paths.

An application for this would be a mountainous terrain with points on it. Obviously going from high to low doesn't take energy, in fact, it generates energy (thus a negative path weight)! But going back again just wouldn't work that way, unless you are Chuck Norris.

I was thinking of incrementing the weight of all points until they are non-negative, but I'm not sure whether that will work.

Answer 1

As long as the graph does not contain a negative cycle (a directed cycle whose edge weights have a negative sum), it will have a shortest path between any two points, but Dijkstra's algorithm is not designed to find them. The best-known algorithm for finding single-source shortest paths in a directed graph with negative edge weights is the Bellman-Ford algorithm. This comes at a cost, however: Bellman-Ford requires O(|V|·|E|) time, while Dijkstra's requires O(|E| + |V|log|V|) time, which is asymptotically faster for both sparse graphs (where E is O(|V|)) and dense graphs (where E is O(|V|^2)).

In your example of a mountainous terrain (necessarily a directed graph, since going up and down an incline have different weights) there is no possibility of a negative cycle, since this would imply leaving a point and then returning to it with a net energy gain - which could be used to create a perpetual motion machine.

Increasing all the weights by a constant value so that they are non-negative will not work. To see this, consider the graph where there are two paths from A to B, one traversing a single edge of length 2, and one traversing edges of length 1, 1, and -2. The second path is shorter, but if you increase all edge weights by 2, the first path now has length 4, and the second path has length 6, reversing the shortest paths. This tactic will only work if all possible paths between the two points use the same number of edges.