Some hard families of parameterised counting problems

We consider parameterised subgraph-counting problems of the following form: given a graph G, how many k-tuples of its vertices have a given property? A number of such problems are known to be #W[1]-complete; here we substantially generalise some of these existing results by proving hardness for two large families of such problems. We demonstrate that it is #W[1]-hard to count the number of k-vertex subgraphs having any property where the number of distinct edge-densities of labelled subgraphs that satisfy the property is o(k^2). In the special case that the property in question depends only on the number of edges in the subgraph, we give a strengthening of this result which leads to our second family of hard problems.Comment: A few more minor changes. This version to appear in the ACM Transactions on Computation Theor

The multicolour size-Ramsey number of powers of paths

Given a positive integer s, a graph G is s-Ramsey for a graph H, denoted G→(H)s, if every s-colouring of the edges of G contains a monochromatic copy of H. The s-colour size-Ramsey number rˆs(H) of a graph H is defined to be rˆs(H)=min⁡{|E(G)|:G→(H)s}. We prove that, for all positive integers k and s, we have rˆs(Pnk)=O(n), where Pnk is the kth power of the n-vertex path Pn