English

Extending the Continuum of Six-Colorings

Combinatorics 2024-04-09 v1

Abstract

We present two novel six-colorings of the Euclidean plane that avoid monochromatic pairs of points at unit distance in five colors and monochromatic pairs at another specified distance dd in the sixth color. Such colorings have previously been known to exist for 0.41<21d1/5<0.450.41 < \sqrt{2} - 1 \le d \le 1 / \sqrt{5} < 0.45. Our results significantly expand that range to 0.354d0.6570.354 \le d \le 0.657, the first improvement in 30 years. Notably, the constructions underlying this were derived by formalizing colorings suggested by a custom machine learning approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.05509,
  title  = {Extending the Continuum of Six-Colorings},
  author = {Konrad Mundinger and Sebastian Pokutta and Christoph Spiegel and Max Zimmer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.05509},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

An animated version of Figure 2 is available at https://christophspiegel.berlin/hn/fig2.pdf and can be viewed with Acrobat Reader