English

The smallest 5-chromatic tournament

Discrete Mathematics 2023-06-26 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

A coloring of a digraph is a partition of its vertex set such that each class induces a digraph with no directed cycles. A digraph is kk-chromatic if kk is the minimum number of classes in such partition, and a digraph is oriented if there is at most one arc between each pair of vertices. Clearly, the smallest kk-chromatic digraph is the complete digraph on kk vertices, but determining the order of the smallest kk-chromatic oriented graphs is a challenging problem. It is known that the smallest 22-, 33- and 44-chromatic oriented graphs have 33, 77 and 1111 vertices, respectively. In 1994, Neumann-Lara conjectured that a smallest 55-chromatic oriented graph has 1717 vertices. We solve this conjecture and show that the correct order is 1919.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.09936,
  title  = {The smallest 5-chromatic tournament},
  author = {Thomas Bellitto and Nicolas Bousquet and Adam Kabela and Théo Pierron},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.09936},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T03:55:32.903Z