English

Elusive properties of countably infinite graphs

Combinatorics 2025-10-22 v3

Abstract

A graph property is elusive (or evasive) if any algorithm testing it by asking questions of the form ''Is there an edge between vertices x and y?'' must, in the worst case, examine all pairs of vertices. Elusiveness for infinite vertex sets has been first studied by Csern\'ak and Soukup, who proved that the long-standing Aanderaa-Karp-Rosenberg Conjecture -- which states that every nontrivial monotone graph property is elusive -- fails for infinite vertex sets. We extend their work by giving a closer look to the case when the vertex set is countably infinite and the ''algorithm'' terminates after infinitely many steps. Among others, we prove that connectedness is elusive, which strengthens a result of Csern\'ak and Soukup. We give counterexamples to the infinite version of the Aanderaa-Karp-Rosenberg Conjecture even if the ''algorithm'' is required to terminate after infinitely many steps, which strengthens results of Csern\'ak and Soukup.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.11798,
  title  = {Elusive properties of countably infinite graphs},
  author = {Márton Elekes and Tamás Kátay and Anett Kocsis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.11798},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

31 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:21:12.960Z