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 $G_{n,p}$ 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 $r$ of available colors immediately and irrevocably without creating a monochromatic copy of some fixed graph $F$ in the process. Our first main result is that for any $F$ and $r$, the threshold function for this problem is given by $p_0(F,r,n)=n^{-1/m_1^*(F,r)}$, where $m_1^*(F,r)$ denotes the so-called \emph{online vertex-Ramsey density} of $F$ and $r$. 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 $F$ and $r$, the online vertex-Ramsey density $m_1^*(F,r)$ is a computable rational number. Our lower bound proof is algorithmic, i.e., we obtain polynomial-time online algorithms that succeed in coloring $G_{n,p}$ as desired with probability $1-o(1)$ for any $p(n) = o(n^{-1/m_1^*(F,r)})$.Comment: some minor addition