Inapproximability of the Tutte polynomial

The Tutte polynomial of a graph G is a two-variable polynomial T(G;x,y) that encodes many interesting properties of the graph. We study the complexity of the following problem, for rationals x and y: take as input a graph G, and output a value which is a good approximation to T(G;x,y). Jaeger et al. have completely mapped the complexity of exactly computing the Tutte polynomial. They have shown that this is #P-hard, except along the hyperbola (x-1)(y-1)=1 and at four special points. We are interested in determining for which points (x,y) there is a fully polynomial randomised approximation scheme (FPRAS) for T(G;x,y). Under the assumption RP≠NP, we prove that there is no FPRAS at (x,y) if (x,y) is in one of the half-planes x<-1 or y<-1 (excluding the easy-to-compute cases mentioned above). Two exceptions to this result are the half-line x<-1,y=1 (which is still open) and the portion of the hyperbola (x-1)(y-1)=2 corresponding to y<-1 which we show to be equivalent in difficulty to approximately counting perfect matchings. We give further intractability results for (x,y) in the vicinity of the origin. A corollary of our results is that, under the assumption RP≠NP, there is no FPRAS at the point (x,y)=(0,1-λ) when λ>2 is a positive integer. Thus, there is no FPRAS for counting nowhere-zero λ flows for λ>2. This is an interesting consequence of our work since the corresponding decision problem is in P for example for λ=6. Although our main concern is to distinguish regions of the Tutte plane that admit an FPRAS from those that do not, we also note that the latter regions exhibit different levels of intractability. At certain points (x,y), for example the integer points on the x-axis, or any point in the positive quadrant, there is a randomised approximation scheme for T(G;x,y) that runs in polynomial time using an oracle for an NP predicate. On the other hand, we identify a region of points (x,y) at which even approximating T(G;x,y) is as hard as #P.