List-3-Coloring ordered graphs with a forbidden induced subgraph
Abstract
The List-3-Coloring Problem is to decide, given a graph and a list of colors assigned to each vertex of , whether admits a proper coloring with for every vertex of , and the -Coloring Problem is the List--Coloring Problem on instances with for every vertex of . The List--Coloring Problem is a classical NP-complete problem, and it is well-known that while restricted to -free graphs (meaning graphs with no induced subgraph isomorphic to a fixed graph ), it remains NP-complete unless is isomorphic to an induced subgraph of a path. However, the current state of art is far from proving this to be sufficient for a polynomial time algorithm; in fact, the complexity of the -Coloring Problem on -free graphs (where denotes the eight-vertex path) is unknown. Here we consider a variant of the List--Coloring Problem called the Ordered Graph List--Coloring Problem, where the input is an ordered graph, that is, a graph along with a linear order on its vertex set. For ordered graphs and , we say is -free if is not isomorphic to an induced subgraph of with the isomorphism preserving the linear order. We prove, assuming to be an ordered graph, a nearly complete dichotomy for the Ordered Graph List--Coloring Problem restricted to -free ordered graphs. In particular, we show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time if has at most one edge, and remains NP-complete if has at least three edges. Moreover, in the case where has exactly two edges, we give a complete dichotomy when the two edges of share an end, and prove several NP-completeness results when the two edges of do not share an end, narrowing the open cases down to three very special types of two-edge ordered graphs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2206.06543,
title = {List-3-Coloring ordered graphs with a forbidden induced subgraph},
author = {Sepehr Hajebi and Yanjia Li and Sophie Spirkl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.06543},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Accepted manuscript; see DOI for journal version