English

Classifying Intrinsically Linked Tournaments by Score Sequence

Geometric Topology 2021-07-22 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

A tournament on 8 or more vertices may be intrinsically linked as a directed graph. We begin the classification of intrinsically linked tournaments by examining their score sequences. While many distinct tournaments may have the same score sequence, there exist score sequences SS such that any tournament with score sequence SS has an embedding with no nonsplit consistently oriented link. We call such score sequences linkless\textit{linkless}, and we show that the vast majority of score sequences for 8 vertex tournaments are linkless. We also extend these results to nn vertex tournaments and are able to classify many longer score sequences as well. We show that for any nn, there exist at least O(n)O(n) linkless score sequences, but we conjecture that the fraction of score sequences of length nn that are linkless goes to 0 as nn becomes large.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.06565,
  title  = {Classifying Intrinsically Linked Tournaments by Score Sequence},
  author = {Thomas Fleming and Joel Foisy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.06565},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

19 pages, 5 figures. The paper has been reorganized and condensed. Interested readers can find detailed proofs of all of the results in version 1

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:31:52.859Z