English

Indecomposable tournaments and their indecomposable subtournaments on 5 and 7 vertices

Combinatorics 2010-07-20 v1

Abstract

Given a tournament T=(V,A), a subset X of VV is an interval of T provided that for every a, b in X and x\in V-X, (a,x) in A if and only if (b,x) in A. For example, \emptyset, {x}(x in V) and V are intervals of T, called trivial intervals. A tournament, all the intervals of which are trivial, is indecomposable; otherwise, it is decomposable. A critical tournament is an indecomposable tournament T of cardinality 5\geq 5 such that for any vertex x of T, the tournament T-x is decomposable. The critical tournaments are of odd cardinality and for all n2n \geq 2 there are exactly three critical tournaments on 2n+1 vertices denoted by T2n+1T_{2n+1}, U2n+1U_{2n+1} and W2n+1W_{2n+1}. The tournaments T5T_{5}, U5U_{5} and W5W_{5} are the unique indecomposable tournaments on 5 vertices. We say that a tournament T embeds into a tournament T' when T is isomorphic to a subtournament of T'. A diamond is a tournament on 4 vertices admitting only one interval of cardinality 3. We prove the following theorem: if a diamond and T5T_{5} embed into an indecomposable tournament T, then W5W_{5} and U5U_{5} embed into T. To conclude, we prove the following: given an indecomposable tournament T, with  ⁣V(T) ⁣7\mid\!V(T)\!\mid \geq 7, T is critical if and only if the indecomposable subtournaments on 7 vertices of T are isomorphic to one and only one of the tournaments T7T_{7}, U7U_{7} and W7W_{7}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1007.3049,
  title  = {Indecomposable tournaments and their indecomposable subtournaments on 5 and 7 vertices},
  author = {Houmem BELKHECHINE and Imed BOUDABBOUS},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.3049},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

12 pages, to appear in Ars Combinatoria