English

Unavoidable structures in infinite tournaments

Combinatorics 2024-05-02 v3 Logic

Abstract

We prove a strong dichotomy result for countably-infinite oriented graphs; that is, we prove that for all countably-infinite oriented graphs GG, either (i) there is a countably-infinite tournament KK such that G⊈KG\not\subseteq K, or (ii) every countably-infinite tournament contains a \emph{spanning} copy of GG. Furthermore, we are able to give a concise characterization of such oriented graphs. Our characterization becomes even simpler in the case of transitive acyclic oriented graphs (i.e. strict partial orders). For uncountable oriented graphs, we are able to extend the dichotomy result mentioned above to all regular cardinals κ\kappa; however, we are only able to provide a concise characterization in the case when κ=1\kappa=\aleph_1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.04636,
  title  = {Unavoidable structures in infinite tournaments},
  author = {Alistair Benford and Louis DeBiasio and Paul Larson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.04636},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

15 pages; (v3) Final version; to appear in Proceedings of the AMS

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:09:36.604Z