New Bounds for Facial Nonrepetitive Colouring

We prove that the facial nonrepetitive chromatic number of any outerplanar graph is at most 11 and of any planar graph is at most 22.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Nonrepetitive Colourings of Planar Graphs with O(log⁡n)O(\log n) Colours

A vertex colouring of a graph is \emph{nonrepetitive} if there is no path for which the first half of the path is assigned the same sequence of colours as the second half. The \emph{nonrepetitive chromatic number} of a graph $G$ is the minimum integer $k$ such that $G$ has a nonrepetitive $k$-colouring. Whether planar graphs have bounded nonrepetitive chromatic number is one of the most important open problems in the field. Despite this, the best known upper bound is $O(\sqrt{n})$ for $n$-vertex planar graphs. We prove a $O(\log n)$ upper bound

Vertex coloring of plane graphs with nonrepetitive boundary paths

A sequence $s_1,s_2,...,s_k,s_1,s_2,...,s_k$ is a repetition. A sequence $S$ is nonrepetitive, if no subsequence of consecutive terms of $S$ form a repetition. Let $G$ be a vertex colored graph. A path of $G$ is nonrepetitive, if the sequence of colors on its vertices is nonrepetitive. If $G$ is a plane graph, then a facial nonrepetitive vertex coloring of $G$ is a vertex coloring such that any facial path is nonrepetitive. Let $\pi_f(G)$ denote the minimum number of colors of a facial nonrepetitive vertex coloring of $G$. Jendro\vl and Harant posed a conjecture that $\pi_f(G)$ can be bounded from above by a constant. We prove that $\pi_f(G)\le 24$ for any plane graph $G$

Nonrepetitive colorings of lexicographic product of graphs

A coloring $c$ of the vertices of a graph $G$ is nonrepetitive if there exists no path $v_1v_2\ldots v_{2l}$ for which $c(v_i)=c(v_{l+i})$ for all $1\le i\le l$. Given graphs $G$ and $H$ with $|V(H)|=k$, the lexicographic product $G[H]$ is the graph obtained by substituting every vertex of $G$ by a copy of $H$, and every edge of $G$ by a copy of $K_{k,k}$. %Our main results are the following. We prove that for a sufficiently long path $P$, a nonrepetitive coloring of $P[K_k]$ needs at least $3k+\lfloor k/2\rfloor$ colors. If $k>2$ then we need exactly $2k+1$ colors to nonrepetitively color $P[E_k]$, where $E_k$ is the empty graph on $k$ vertices. If we further require that every copy of $E_k$ be rainbow-colored and the path $P$ is sufficiently long, then the smallest number of colors needed for $P[E_k]$ is at least $3k+1$ and at most $3k+\lceil k/2\rceil$. Finally, we define fractional nonrepetitive colorings of graphs and consider the connections between this notion and the above results

A new approach to nonrepetitive sequences

A sequence is nonrepetitive if it does not contain two adjacent identical blocks. The remarkable construction of Thue asserts that 3 symbols are enough to build an arbitrarily long nonrepetitive sequence. It is still not settled whether the following extension holds: for every sequence of 3-element sets $L_1,..., L_n$ there exists a nonrepetitive sequence $s_1, ..., s_n$ with $s_i\in L_i$. Applying the probabilistic method one can prove that this is true for sufficiently large sets $L_i$. We present an elementary proof that sets of size 4 suffice (confirming the best known bound). The argument is a simple counting with Catalan numbers involved. Our approach is inspired by a new algorithmic proof of the Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma due to Moser and Tardos and its interpretations by Fortnow and Tao. The presented method has further applications to nonrepetitive games and nonrepetitive colorings of graphs.Comment: 5 pages, no figures.arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1103.381

Acyclic edge-coloring using entropy compression

An edge-coloring of a graph G is acyclic if it is a proper edge-coloring of G and every cycle contains at least three colors. We prove that every graph with maximum degree Delta has an acyclic edge-coloring with at most 4 Delta - 4 colors, improving the previous bound of 9.62 (Delta - 1). Our bound results from the analysis of a very simple randomised procedure using the so-called entropy compression method. We show that the expected running time of the procedure is O(mn Delta^2 log Delta), where n and m are the number of vertices and edges of G. Such a randomised procedure running in expected polynomial time was only known to exist in the case where at least 16 Delta colors were available. Our aim here is to make a pedagogic tutorial on how to use these ideas to analyse a broad range of graph coloring problems. As an application, also show that every graph with maximum degree Delta has a star coloring with 2 sqrt(2) Delta^{3/2} + Delta colors.Comment: 13 pages, revised versio

Pathwidth and nonrepetitive list coloring

A vertex coloring of a graph is nonrepetitive if there is no path in the graph whose first half receives the same sequence of colors as the second half. While every tree can be nonrepetitively colored with a bounded number of colors (4 colors is enough), Fiorenzi, Ochem, Ossona de Mendez, and Zhu recently showed that this does not extend to the list version of the problem, that is, for every $\ell \geq 1$ there is a tree that is not nonrepetitively $\ell$-choosable. In this paper we prove the following positive result, which complements the result of Fiorenzi et al.: There exists a function $f$ such that every tree of pathwidth $k$ is nonrepetitively $f(k)$-choosable. We also show that such a property is specific to trees by constructing a family of pathwidth-2 graphs that are not nonrepetitively $\ell$-choosable for any fixed $\ell$.Comment: v2: Minor changes made following helpful comments by the referee

Anagram-free Graph Colouring

An anagram is a word of the form $WP$ where $W$ is a non-empty word and $P$ is a permutation of $W$. We study anagram-free graph colouring and give bounds on the chromatic number. Alon et al. (2002) asked whether anagram-free chromatic number is bounded by a function of the maximum degree. We answer this question in the negative by constructing graphs with maximum degree 3 and unbounded anagram-free chromatic number. We also prove upper and lower bounds on the anagram-free chromatic number of trees in terms of their radius and pathwidth. Finally, we explore extensions to edge colouring and $k$-anagram-free colouring.Comment: Version 2: Changed 'abelian square' to 'anagram' for consistency with 'Anagram-free colourings of graphs' by Kam\v{c}ev, {\L}uczak, and Sudakov. Minor changes based on referee feedbac