  We present randomized algorithms for some well-studied, hard combinatorial
problems: the k-path problem, the p-packing of q-sets problem, and the
q-dimensional p-matching problem. Our algorithms solve these problems with high
probability in time exponential only in the parameter (k, p, q) and using
polynomial space; the constant bases of the exponentials are significantly
smaller than in previous works. For example, for the k-path problem the
improvement is from 2 to 1.66. We also show how to detect if a d-regular graph
admits an edge coloring with $d$ colors in time within a polynomial factor of
O(2^{(d-1)n/2}).
  Our techniques build upon and generalize some recently published ideas by I.
Koutis (ICALP 2009), R. Williams (IPL 2009), and A. Bj\"orklund (STACS 2010,
FOCS 2010).
