English

Tournament quasirandomness from local counting

Combinatorics 2019-10-23 v1

Abstract

A well-known theorem of Chung and Graham states that if h4h\geq 4 then a tournament TT is quasirandom if and only if TT contains each hh-vertex tournament the "correct number" of times as a subtournament. In this paper we investigate the relationship between quasirandomness of TT and the count of a single hh-vertex tournament HH in TT. We consider two types of counts, the global one and the local one. We first observe that if TT has the correct global count of HH and h7h \geq 7 then quasirandomness of TT is only forced if HH is transitive. The next natural question when studying quasirandom objects asks whether possessing the correct local counts of HH is enough to force quasirandomness of TT. A tournament HH is said to be locally forcing if it has this property. Variants of the local forcing problem have been studied before in both the graph and hypergraph settings. Perhaps the closest analogue of our problem was considered by Simonovits and S\'os who looked at whether having "correct counts" of a fixed graph HH as an induced subgraph of GG implies GG must be quasirandom, in an appropriate sense. They proved that this is indeed the case when HH is regular and conjectured that it holds for all HH (except the path on 3 vertices). Contrary to the Simonovits-S\'os conjecture, in the tournament setting we prove that a constant proportion of all tournaments are not locally forcing. In fact, any locally forcing tournament must itself be strongly quasirandom. On the other hand, unlike the global forcing case, we construct infinite families of non-transitive locally forcing tournaments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.09936,
  title  = {Tournament quasirandomness from local counting},
  author = {M. Bucić and E. Long and A. Shapira and B. Sudakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.09936},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

19 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:51:11.159Z