675 research outputs found
Subgraphs and Colourability of Locatable Graphs
We study a game of pursuit and evasion introduced by Seager in 2012, in which
a cop searches the robber from outside the graph, using distance queries. A
graph on which the cop wins is called locatable. In her original paper, Seager
asked whether there exists a characterisation of the graph property of
locatable graphs by either forbidden or forbidden induced subgraphs, both of
which we answer in the negative. We then proceed to show that such a
characterisation does exist for graphs of diameter at most 2, stating it
explicitly, and note that this is not true for higher diameter. Exploring a
different direction of topic, we also start research in the direction of
colourability of locatable graphs, we also show that every locatable graph is
4-colourable, but not necessarily 3-colourable.Comment: 25 page
Smallest snarks with oddness 4 and cyclic connectivity 4 have order 44
The family of snarks -- connected bridgeless cubic graphs that cannot be
3-edge-coloured -- is well-known as a potential source of counterexamples to
several important and long-standing conjectures in graph theory. These include
the cycle double cover conjecture, Tutte's 5-flow conjecture, Fulkerson's
conjecture, and several others. One way of approaching these conjectures is
through the study of structural properties of snarks and construction of small
examples with given properties. In this paper we deal with the problem of
determining the smallest order of a nontrivial snark (that is, one which is
cyclically 4-edge-connected and has girth at least 5) of oddness at least 4.
Using a combination of structural analysis with extensive computations we prove
that the smallest order of a snark with oddness at least 4 and cyclic
connectivity 4 is 44. Formerly it was known that such a snark must have at
least 38 vertices [J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 103 (2013), 468--488] and one such
snark on 44 vertices was constructed by Lukot'ka et al. [Electron. J. Combin.
22 (2015), #P1.51]. The proof requires determining all cyclically
4-edge-connected snarks on 36 vertices, which extends the previously compiled
list of all such snarks up to 34 vertices [J. Combin. Theory Ser. B, loc.
cit.]. As a by-product, we use this new list to test the validity of several
conjectures where snarks can be smallest counterexamples.Comment: 21 page
Some snarks are worse than others
Many conjectures and open problems in graph theory can either be reduced to
cubic graphs or are directly stated for cubic graphs. Furthermore, it is known
that for a lot of problems, a counterexample must be a snark, i.e. a bridgeless
cubic graph which is not 3--edge-colourable. In this paper we deal with the
fact that the family of potential counterexamples to many interesting
conjectures can be narrowed even further to the family of
bridgeless cubic graphs whose edge set cannot be covered with four perfect
matchings. The Cycle Double Cover Conjecture, the Shortest Cycle Cover
Conjecture and the Fan-Raspaud Conjecture are examples of statements for which
is crucial. In this paper, we study parameters which have
the potential to further refine and thus enlarge the set of
cubic graphs for which the mentioned conjectures can be verified. We show that
can be naturally decomposed into subsets with increasing
complexity, thereby producing a natural scale for proving these conjectures.
More precisely, we consider the following parameters and questions: given a
bridgeless cubic graph, (i) how many perfect matchings need to be added, (ii)
how many copies of the same perfect matching need to be added, and (iii) how
many 2--factors need to be added so that the resulting regular graph is Class
I? We present new results for these parameters and we also establish some
strong relations between these problems and some long-standing conjectures.Comment: 27 pages, 16 figure
On the Complexity of Role Colouring Planar Graphs, Trees and Cographs
We prove several results about the complexity of the role colouring problem.
A role colouring of a graph is an assignment of colours to the vertices of
such that two vertices of the same colour have identical sets of colours in
their neighbourhoods. We show that the problem of finding a role colouring with
colours is NP-hard for planar graphs. We show that restricting the
problem to trees yields a polynomially solvable case, as long as is either
constant or has a constant difference with , the number of vertices in the
tree. Finally, we prove that cographs are always -role-colourable for
and construct such a colouring in polynomial time
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