Coloring Grids Avoiding Bicolored Paths

The vertex-coloring problem on graphs avoiding bicolored members of a family of subgraphs has been widely studied. Most well-known examples are star coloring and acyclic coloring of graphs (Gr\"unbaum, 1973) where bicolored copies of $P_4$ and cycles are not allowed, respectively. In this paper, we study a variation of this problem, by considering vertex coloring on grids forbidding bicolored paths. We let $P_k$-chromatic number of a graph be the minimum number of colors needed to color the vertex set properly avoiding a bicolored $P_k.$ We show that in any 3-coloring of the cartesian product of paths, $P_{k-2}\square P_{k-2}$, there is a bicolored $P_k.$ With our result, the problem of finding the $P_k$-chromatic number of product of two paths (2-dimensional grid) is settled for all $k.

Coloring of Graphs Avoiding Bicolored Paths of a Fixed Length

The problem of finding the minimum number of colors to color a graph properly without containing any bicolored copy of a fixed family of subgraphs has been widely studied. Most well-known examples are star coloring and acyclic coloring of graphs (Gr\"unbaum, 1973) where bicolored copies of $P_4$ and cycles are not allowed, respectively. In this paper, we introduce a variation of these problems and study proper coloring of graphs not containing a bicolored path of a fixed length and provide general bounds for all graphs. A $P_k$-coloring of an undirected graph $G$ is a proper vertex coloring of $G$ such that there is no bicolored copy of $P_k$ in $G,$ and the minimum number of colors needed for a $P_k$-coloring of $G$ is called the $P_k$-chromatic number of $G,$ denoted by $s_k(G).$ We provide bounds on $s_k(G)$ for all graphs, in particular, proving that for any graph $G$ with maximum degree $d\geq 2,$ and $k\geq4,$ $s_k(G)=O(d^{\frac{k-1}{k-2}}).$ Moreover, we find the exact values for the $P_k$-chromatic number of the products of some cycles and paths for $k=5,6.