M G ] 2 O ct 2 00 6 GEODESICS AND ALMOST GEODESIC CYCLES IN RANDOM REGULAR GRAPHS

Abstract. A geodesic in a graph G is a shortest path between two vertices of G. For a specific function e(n) of n, we define an almost geodesic cycle C in G to be a cycle in which for every two vertices u and v in C, the distance dG(u, v) is at least dC(u, v) − e(n). Let ω(n) be any function tending to infinity with n. We consider a random d-regular graph on n vertices. We show that almost all pairs of vertices belong to an almost geodesic cycle C with e(n) = logd−1 logd−1 n + ω(n) and |C| = 2 logd−1 n + O(ω(n)). Along the way, we obtain results on near-geodesic paths. We also give the limiting distribution of the number of geodesics between two random vertices in this random graph.