Grundy Coloring & Friends, Half-Graphs, Bicliques

The first-fit coloring is a heuristic that assigns to each vertex, arriving in a specified order ?, the smallest available color. The problem Grundy Coloring asks how many colors are needed for the most adversarial vertex ordering ?, i.e., the maximum number of colors that the first-fit coloring requires over all possible vertex orderings. Since its inception by Grundy in 1939, Grundy Coloring has been examined for its structural and algorithmic aspects. A brute-force f(k)n^{2^{k-1}}-time algorithm for Grundy Coloring on general graphs is not difficult to obtain, where k is the number of colors required by the most adversarial vertex ordering. It was asked several times whether the dependency on k in the exponent of n can be avoided or reduced, and its answer seemed elusive until now. We prove that Grundy Coloring is W[1]-hard and the brute-force algorithm is essentially optimal under the Exponential Time Hypothesis, thus settling this question by the negative. The key ingredient in our W[1]-hardness proof is to use so-called half-graphs as a building block to transmit a color from one vertex to another. Leveraging the half-graphs, we also prove that b-Chromatic Core is W[1]-hard, whose parameterized complexity was posed as an open question by Panolan et al. [JCSS \u2717]. A natural follow-up question is, how the parameterized complexity changes in the absence of (large) half-graphs. We establish fixed-parameter tractability on K_{t,t}-free graphs for b-Chromatic Core and Partial Grundy Coloring, making a step toward answering this question. The key combinatorial lemma underlying the tractability result might be of independent interest

Distributed coloring in sparse graphs with fewer colors

This paper is concerned with efficiently coloring sparse graphs in the distributed setting with as few colors as possible. According to the celebrated Four Color Theorem, planar graphs can be colored with at most 4 colors, and the proof gives a (sequential) quadratic algorithm finding such a coloring. A natural problem is to improve this complexity in the distributed setting. Using the fact that planar graphs contain linearly many vertices of degree at most 6, Goldberg, Plotkin, and Shannon obtained a deterministic distributed algorithm coloring $n$-vertex planar graphs with 7 colors in $O(\log n)$ rounds. Here, we show how to color planar graphs with 6 colors in \mbox{polylog}(n) rounds. Our algorithm indeed works more generally in the list-coloring setting and for sparse graphs (for such graphs we improve by at least one the number of colors resulting from an efficient algorithm of Barenboim and Elkin, at the expense of a slightly worst complexity). Our bounds on the number of colors turn out to be quite sharp in general. Among other results, we show that no distributed algorithm can color every $n$-vertex planar graph with 4 colors in $o(n)$ rounds.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures - An extended abstract of this work was presented at PODC'18 (ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Graphs that do not contain a cycle with a node that has at least two neighbors on it

We recall several known results about minimally 2-connected graphs, and show that they all follow from a decomposition theorem. Starting from an analogy with critically 2-connected graphs, we give structural characterizations of the classes of graphs that do not contain as a subgraph and as an induced subgraph, a cycle with a node that has at least two neighbors on the cycle. From these characterizations we get polynomial time recognition algorithms for these classes, as well as polynomial time algorithms for vertex-coloring and edge-coloring

Four proofs of the directed Brooks' Theorem

We give four new proofs of the directed version of Brook's Theorem and an NP-completeness result.Comment: 15 page