Online Ramsey numbers of the claw versus cycles
Abstract
The online Ramsey number is defined via a Builder--Painter game on an empty graph with countably many vertices. In each round, Builder reveals an edge, which Painter immediately colors either red or blue. Builder wins once a red copy of or a blue copy of appears, and is the minimum number of edges Builder must reveal to force a win. For a long cycle , the online Ramsey numbers are known only for a few specific choices of . In particular, exact values were determined for by Cyman, Dzido, Lapinskas, and Lo (Electron. J. Combin., 2015), while asymptotically tight results were obtained when is an even cycle by Adamski, Bednarska-Bzd\c{e}ga, and Bla\v{z}ej (SIAM J. Discrete Math., 2024). In this paper, we consider the case where is the claw and determine the exact value of . We show that
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.05452,
title = {Online Ramsey numbers of the claw versus cycles},
author = {Hexuan Zhi and Yanbo Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.05452},
year = {2026}
}