English

Making a tournament indecomposable by one subtournament-reversal operation

Combinatorics 2021-04-13 v1

Abstract

Given a tournament TT, a module of TT is a subset MM of V(T)V(T) such that for x,yMx, y\in M and vV(T)Mv\in V(T)\setminus M, (v,x)A(T)(v,x)\in A(T) if and only if (v,y)A(T)(v,y)\in A(T). The trivial modules of TT are \emptyset, {u}\{u\} (uV(T))(u\in V(T)) and V(T)V(T). The tournament TT is indecomposable if all its modules are trivial; otherwise it is decomposable. Let TT be a tournament with at least five vertices. In a previous paper, the authors proved that the smallest number δ(T)\delta(T) of arcs that must be reversed to make TT indecomposable satisfies δ(T)v(T)+14\delta(T) \leq \left\lceil \frac{v(T)+1}{4} \right\rceil, and this bound is sharp, where v(T)=V(T)v(T) = |V(T)| is the order of TT. In this paper, we prove that if the tournament TT is not transitive of even order, then TT can be made indecomposable by reversing the arcs of a subtournament of TT. We denote by δ(T)\delta'(T) the smallest size of such a subtournament. We also prove that δ(T)=δ(T)2\delta(T) = \left\lceil \frac{\delta'(T)}{2} \right\rceil.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.04851,
  title  = {Making a tournament indecomposable by one subtournament-reversal operation},
  author = {Houmem Belkhechine and Cherifa Ben Salha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.04851},
  year   = {2021}
}

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15 pages