39 research outputs found
Approximately coloring graphs without long induced paths
It is an open problem whether the 3-coloring problem can be solved in
polynomial time in the class of graphs that do not contain an induced path on
vertices, for fixed . We propose an algorithm that, given a 3-colorable
graph without an induced path on vertices, computes a coloring with
many colors. If the input graph is
triangle-free, we only need many
colors. The running time of our algorithm is if the input
graph has vertices and edges
List coloring in the absence of a linear forest.
The k-Coloring problem is to decide whether a graph can be colored with at most k colors such that no two adjacent vertices receive the same color. The Listk-Coloring problem requires in addition that every vertex u must receive a color from some given set L(u)⊆{1,…,k}. Let Pn denote the path on n vertices, and G+H and rH the disjoint union of two graphs G and H and r copies of H, respectively. For any two fixed integers k and r, we show that Listk-Coloring can be solved in polynomial time for graphs with no induced rP1+P5, hereby extending the result of Hoàng, Kamiński, Lozin, Sawada and Shu for graphs with no induced P5. Our result is tight; we prove that for any graph H that is a supergraph of P1+P5 with at least 5 edges, already List 5-Coloring is NP-complete for graphs with no induced H