Counting thin subgraphs via packings faster than meet-in-the-middle time
Vassilevska and Williams (STOC'09) showed how to count simple paths on k vertices and matchings on k/2 edges in ann-vertex graph in time nk/2+O(1). In the same year, two different algorithms with the same runtime were given by Koutis and Williams (ICALP'09), and Bjorklund et al. (ESA'09), via nst/2+O(1)-time algorithms for counting t-tuples of pairwise disjoint sets drawn from a given family of s-