423 research outputs found

    Excluding pairs of tournaments

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    The Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal conjecture states that for every given undirected graph HH there exists a constant c(H)>0c(H)>0 such that every graph GG that does not contain HH as an induced subgraph contains a clique or a stable set of size at least ∣V(G)∣c(H)|V(G)|^{c(H)}. The conjecture is still open. Its equivalent directed version states that for every given tournament HH there exists a constant c(H)>0c(H)>0 such that every HH-free tournament TT contains a transitive subtournament of order at least ∣V(T)∣c(H)|V(T)|^{c(H)}. We prove in this paper that {H1,H2}\{H_{1},H_{2}\}-free tournaments TT contain transitive subtournaments of size at least ∣V(T)∣c(H1,H2)|V(T)|^{c(H_{1},H_{2})} for some c(H1,H2)>0c(H_{1},H_{2})>0 and several pairs of tournaments: H1H_{1}, H2H_{2}. In particular we prove that {H,Hc}\{H,H^{c}\}-freeness implies existence of the polynomial-size transitive subtournaments for several tournaments HH for which the conjecture is still open (HcH^{c} stands for the \textit{complement of HH}). To the best of our knowledge these are first nontrivial results of this type
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