2,568 research outputs found
Characterising and recognising game-perfect graphs
Consider a vertex colouring game played on a simple graph with
permissible colours. Two players, a maker and a breaker, take turns to colour
an uncoloured vertex such that adjacent vertices receive different colours. The
game ends once the graph is fully coloured, in which case the maker wins, or
the graph can no longer be fully coloured, in which case the breaker wins. In
the game , the breaker makes the first move. Our main focus is on the
class of -perfect graphs: graphs such that for every induced subgraph ,
the game played on admits a winning strategy for the maker with only
colours, where denotes the clique number of .
Complementing analogous results for other variations of the game, we
characterise -perfect graphs in two ways, by forbidden induced subgraphs
and by explicit structural descriptions. We also present a clique module
decomposition, which may be of independent interest, that allows us to
efficiently recognise -perfect graphs.Comment: 39 pages, 8 figures. An extended abstract was accepted at the
International Colloquium on Graph Theory (ICGT) 201
Topological lower bounds for the chromatic number: A hierarchy
This paper is a study of ``topological'' lower bounds for the chromatic
number of a graph. Such a lower bound was first introduced by Lov\'asz in 1978,
in his famous proof of the \emph{Kneser conjecture} via Algebraic Topology.
This conjecture stated that the \emph{Kneser graph} \KG_{m,n}, the graph with
all -element subsets of as vertices and all pairs of
disjoint sets as edges, has chromatic number . Several other proofs
have since been published (by B\'ar\'any, Schrijver, Dolnikov, Sarkaria, Kriz,
Greene, and others), all of them based on some version of the Borsuk--Ulam
theorem, but otherwise quite different. Each can be extended to yield some
lower bound on the chromatic number of an arbitrary graph. (Indeed, we observe
that \emph{every} finite graph may be represented as a generalized Kneser
graph, to which the above bounds apply.)
We show that these bounds are almost linearly ordered by strength, the
strongest one being essentially Lov\'asz' original bound in terms of a
neighborhood complex. We also present and compare various definitions of a
\emph{box complex} of a graph (developing ideas of Alon, Frankl, and Lov\'asz
and of \kriz). A suitable box complex is equivalent to Lov\'asz' complex, but
the construction is simpler and functorial, mapping graphs with homomorphisms
to -spaces with -maps.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. Jahresbericht der DMV, to appea
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