English

On a clique-building game of Erd\H{o}s

Combinatorics 2026-05-06 v2

Abstract

The following game was introduced in a list of open problems from 1983 attributed to Erd\H{o}s: two players take turns claiming edges of a KnK_n until all edges are exhausted. Player 1 wins the game if the largest clique that they claim at the end is strictly larger than the largest clique of their opponent; otherwise, Player 2 wins the game. Erd\H{o}s conjectured that Player 2 always wins this game for n3n\geq 3. We make the first known progress on this problem, proving that this holds for at least 3/43/4 of all such nn. We also address a biased version of this game, as well as the corresponding degree-building game, both of which were originally proposed by Erd\H{o}s as well.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.18304,
  title  = {On a clique-building game of Erd\H{o}s},
  author = {Alexandru Malekshahian and Sam Spiro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.18304},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages; accepted at Journal of Graph Theory