The determination of graph minors is an NP-hard problem for which no good algorithms are known, although brute-force methods such as those
due to Robertson, Sanders, and Thomas exist.
Every graph minor is a topological minor, but
the converse does not necessarily hold.
For any fixed graph ,
it is possible to test whether is a minor of an given graph in polynomial time, so if a forbidden minor characterization
is available, then any graph property which is preserved by deletions and contractions
may be recognized in polynomial time (Fellows and Langston 1988, Robertson and Seymour
1995).
As of 2022, the plane and projective plane are the only surfaces for which a complete list of forbidden minors is known for graph embedding (Mohar and Škoda 2020).
A graph
is called a topological minor of a graph if a graph expansion of
is isomorphic to a subgraph of . Every topological minor is also a minor,
but the converse is not necessarily true.
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