We revisit a well-known family of polynomial ideals encoding the problem of
graph-k-colorability. Our paper describes how the inherent combinatorial
structure of the ideals implies several interesting algebraic properties.
Specifically, we provide lower bounds on the difficulty of computing Gr\"obner
bases and Nullstellensatz certificates for the coloring ideals of general
graphs. For chordal graphs, however, we explicitly describe a Gr\"obner basis
for the coloring ideal, and provide a polynomial-time algorithm.Comment: 16 page