Defective and Clustered Graph Colouring

Consider the following two ways to colour the vertices of a graph where the requirement that adjacent vertices get distinct colours is relaxed. A colouring has "defect" $d$ if each monochromatic component has maximum degree at most $d$. A colouring has "clustering" $c$ if each monochromatic component has at most $c$ vertices. This paper surveys research on these types of colourings, where the first priority is to minimise the number of colours, with small defect or small clustering as a secondary goal. List colouring variants are also considered. The following graph classes are studied: outerplanar graphs, planar graphs, graphs embeddable in surfaces, graphs with given maximum degree, graphs with given maximum average degree, graphs excluding a given subgraph, graphs with linear crossing number, linklessly or knotlessly embeddable graphs, graphs with given Colin de Verdi\`ere parameter, graphs with given circumference, graphs excluding a fixed graph as an immersion, graphs with given thickness, graphs with given stack- or queue-number, graphs excluding $K_t$ as a minor, graphs excluding $K_{s,t}$ as a minor, and graphs excluding an arbitrary graph $H$ as a minor. Several open problems are discussed.Comment: This is a preliminary version of a dynamic survey to be published in the Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

Few Long Lists for Edge Choosability of Planar Cubic Graphs

It is known that every loopless cubic graph is 4-edge choosable. We prove the following strengthened result. Let G be a planar cubic graph having b cut-edges. There exists a set F of at most 5b/2 edges of G with the following property. For any function L which assigns to each edge of F a set of 4 colours and which assigns to each edge in E(G)-F a set of 3 colours, the graph G has a proper edge colouring where the colour of each edge e belongs to L(e).Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

Chip games and paintability

We prove that the difference between the paint number and the choice number of a complete bipartite graph $K_{N,N}$ is $\Theta(\log \log N )$. That answers the question of Zhu (2009) whether this difference, for all graphs, can be bounded by a common constant. By a classical correspondence, our result translates to the framework of on-line coloring of uniform hypergraphs. This way we obtain that for every on-line two coloring algorithm there exists a k-uniform hypergraph with $\Theta(2^k )$ edges on which the strategy fails. The results are derived through an analysis of a natural family of chip games

Sequence variations of the 1-2-3 Conjecture and irregularity strength

Karonski, Luczak, and Thomason (2004) conjectured that, for any connected graph G on at least three vertices, there exists an edge weighting from {1,2,3} such that adjacent vertices receive different sums of incident edge weights. Bartnicki, Grytczuk, and Niwcyk (2009) made a stronger conjecture, that each edge's weight may be chosen from an arbitrary list of size 3 rather than {1,2,3}. We examine a variation of these conjectures, where each vertex is coloured with a sequence of edge weights. Such a colouring relies on an ordering of the graph's edges, and so two variations arise -- one where we may choose any ordering of the edges and one where the ordering is fixed. In the former case, we bound the list size required for any graph. In the latter, we obtain a bound on list sizes for graphs with sufficiently large minimum degree. We also extend our methods to a list variation of irregularity strength, where each vertex receives a distinct sequence of edge weights.Comment: Accepted to Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Scienc