English

An Improved Bound for First-Fit on Posets Without Two Long Incomparable Chains

Combinatorics 2015-03-19 v3

Abstract

It is known that the First-Fit algorithm for partitioning a poset P into chains uses relatively few chains when P does not have two incomparable chains each of size k. In particular, if P has width w then Bosek, Krawczyk, and Szczypka (SIAM J. Discrete Math., 23(4):1992--1999, 2010) proved an upper bound of ckw^{2} on the number of chains used by First-Fit for some constant c, while Joret and Milans (Order, 28(3):455--464, 2011) gave one of ck^{2}w. In this paper we prove an upper bound of the form ckw. This is best possible up to the value of c.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1111.2370,
  title  = {An Improved Bound for First-Fit on Posets Without Two Long Incomparable Chains},
  author = {Vida Dujmović and Gwenaël Joret and David R. Wood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.2370},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

v3: referees' comments incorporated

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:33:48.236Z