2,832 research outputs found
Online Ramsey Games in Random Graphs
Consider the following one-player game. Starting with the empty graph on n vertices, in every step a new edge is drawn uniformly at random and inserted into the current graph. This edge has to be coloured immediately with one of r available colours. The player's goal is to avoid creating a monochromatic copy of some fixed graph F for as long as possible. We prove a lower bound of nÎČ(F,r) on the typical duration of this game, where ÎČ(F,r) is a function that is strictly increasing in r and satisfies limrââ ÎČ(F,r) = 2 â 1/m2(F), where n2â1/m2(F) is the threshold of the corresponding offline colouring proble
Bounds on Ramsey Games via Alterations
This note contains a refined alteration approach for constructing H-free
graphs: we show that removing all edges in H-copies of the binomial random
graph does not significantly change the independence number (for suitable
edge-probabilities); previous alteration approaches of Erdos and Krivelevich
remove only a subset of these edges. We present two applications to online
graph Ramsey games of recent interest, deriving new bounds for Ramsey, Paper,
Scissors games and online Ramsey numbers.Comment: 9 page
Upper Bounds for Online Ramsey Games in Random Graphs
Consider the following one-player game. Starting with the empty graph on n vertices, in every step a new edge is drawn uniformly at random and inserted into the current graph. This edge has to be coloured immediately with one of r available colours. The player's goal is to avoid creating a monochromatic copy of some fixed graph F for as long as possible. We prove an upper bound on the typical duration of this game if F is from a large class of graphs including cliques and cycles of arbitrary size. Together with lower bounds published elsewhere, explicit threshold functions follo
Short proofs of some extremal results
We prove several results from different areas of extremal combinatorics,
giving complete or partial solutions to a number of open problems. These
results, coming from areas such as extremal graph theory, Ramsey theory and
additive combinatorics, have been collected together because in each case the
relevant proofs are quite short.Comment: 19 page
Coloring random graphs online without creating monochromatic subgraphs
Consider the following random process: The vertices of a binomial random
graph are revealed one by one, and at each step only the edges
induced by the already revealed vertices are visible. Our goal is to assign to
each vertex one from a fixed number of available colors immediately and
irrevocably without creating a monochromatic copy of some fixed graph in
the process. Our first main result is that for any and , the threshold
function for this problem is given by , where
denotes the so-called \emph{online vertex-Ramsey density} of
and . This parameter is defined via a purely deterministic two-player game,
in which the random process is replaced by an adversary that is subject to
certain restrictions inherited from the random setting. Our second main result
states that for any and , the online vertex-Ramsey density
is a computable rational number. Our lower bound proof is algorithmic, i.e., we
obtain polynomial-time online algorithms that succeed in coloring as
desired with probability for any .Comment: some minor addition
Ramsey games with giants
The classical result in the theory of random graphs, proved by Erdos and
Renyi in 1960, concerns the threshold for the appearance of the giant component
in the random graph process. We consider a variant of this problem, with a
Ramsey flavor. Now, each random edge that arrives in the sequence of rounds
must be colored with one of R colors. The goal can be either to create a giant
component in every color class, or alternatively, to avoid it in every color.
One can analyze the offline or online setting for this problem. In this paper,
we consider all these variants and provide nontrivial upper and lower bounds;
in certain cases (like online avoidance) the obtained bounds are asymptotically
tight.Comment: 29 pages; minor revision
On the path-avoidance vertex-coloring game
For any graph and any integer , the \emph{online vertex-Ramsey
density of and }, denoted , is a parameter defined via a
deterministic two-player Ramsey-type game (Painter vs.\ Builder). This
parameter was introduced in a recent paper \cite{mrs11}, where it was shown
that the online vertex-Ramsey density determines the threshold of a similar
probabilistic one-player game (Painter vs.\ the binomial random graph
). For a large class of graphs , including cliques, cycles,
complete bipartite graphs, hypercubes, wheels, and stars of arbitrary size, a
simple greedy strategy is optimal for Painter and closed formulas for
are known. In this work we show that for the case where
is a (long) path, the picture is very different. It is not hard to see that
for an appropriately defined integer
, and that the greedy strategy gives a lower bound of
. We construct and analyze Painter strategies that
improve on this greedy lower bound by a factor polynomial in , and we
show that no superpolynomial improvement is possible
Designing Networks with Good Equilibria under Uncertainty
We consider the problem of designing network cost-sharing protocols with good
equilibria under uncertainty. The underlying game is a multicast game in a
rooted undirected graph with nonnegative edge costs. A set of k terminal
vertices or players need to establish connectivity with the root. The social
optimum is the Minimum Steiner Tree. We are interested in situations where the
designer has incomplete information about the input. We propose two different
models, the adversarial and the stochastic. In both models, the designer has
prior knowledge of the underlying metric but the requested subset of the
players is not known and is activated either in an adversarial manner
(adversarial model) or is drawn from a known probability distribution
(stochastic model).
In the adversarial model, the designer's goal is to choose a single,
universal protocol that has low Price of Anarchy (PoA) for all possible
requested subsets of players. The main question we address is: to what extent
can prior knowledge of the underlying metric help in the design? We first
demonstrate that there exist graphs (outerplanar) where knowledge of the
underlying metric can dramatically improve the performance of good network
design. Then, in our main technical result, we show that there exist graph
metrics, for which knowing the underlying metric does not help and any
universal protocol has PoA of , which is tight. We attack this
problem by developing new techniques that employ powerful tools from extremal
combinatorics, and more specifically Ramsey Theory in high dimensional
hypercubes.
Then we switch to the stochastic model, where each player is independently
activated. We show that there exists a randomized ordered protocol that
achieves constant PoA. By using standard derandomization techniques, we produce
a deterministic ordered protocol with constant PoA.Comment: This version has additional results about stochastic inpu
Erdos-Szekeres-type theorems for monotone paths and convex bodies
For any sequence of positive integers j_1 < j_2 < ... < j_n, the k-tuples
(j_i,j_{i + 1},...,j_{i + k-1}), i=1, 2,..., n - k+1, are said to form a
monotone path of length n. Given any integers n\ge k\ge 2 and q\ge 2, what is
the smallest integer N with the property that no matter how we color all
k-element subsets of [N]=\{1,2,..., N\} with q colors, we can always find a
monochromatic monotone path of length n? Denoting this minimum by N_k(q,n), it
follows from the seminal 1935 paper of Erd\H os and Szekeres that
N_2(q,n)=(n-1)^q+1 and N_3(2,n) = {2n -4\choose n-2} + 1. Determining the other
values of these functions appears to be a difficult task. Here we show that
2^{(n/q)^{q-1}} \leq N_3(q,n) \leq 2^{n^{q-1}\log n}, for q \geq 2 and n \geq
q+2. Using a stepping-up approach that goes back to Erdos and Hajnal, we prove
analogous bounds on N_k(q,n) for larger values of k, which are towers of height
k-1 in n^{q-1}. As a geometric application, we prove the following extension of
the Happy Ending Theorem. Every family of at least M(n)=2^{n^2 \log n} plane
convex bodies in general position, any pair of which share at most two boundary
points, has n members in convex position, that is, it has n members such that
each of them contributes a point to the boundary of the convex hull of their
union.Comment: 32 page
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