English
Related papers

Related papers: Cop-width, flip-width and strong colouring numbers

200 papers

We generalise the popular cops and robbers game to multi-layer graphs, where each cop and the robber are restricted to a single layer (or set of edges). We show that initial intuition about the best way to allocate cops to layers is not…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Jessica Enright , Kitty Meeks , William Pettersson , John Sylvester

A flip of a graph is obtained by complementing the edge relation within a set of vertices. Flips are typically used to separate vertices in a graph, by increasing the distances between them. We show that in $K_{t,t}$-free graphs, every…

A strong edge coloring of a graph is a proper edge coloring in which every color class is an induced matching. The strong chromatic index $\chi_s'(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of colors in a strong edge coloring of $G$. Let…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-02-20 Tao Wang , Xiaodan Zhao

Meyniel's conjecture states that $n$-vertex connected graphs have cop number $O(\sqrt{n})$. The current best known upper bound is $n/2^{(1-o(1))\sqrt{\log n}}$, proved independently by Lu and Peng (2011), and by Scott and Sudakov (2011). In…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Prosenjit Bose , Louis Esperet , Jędrzej Hodor , Gwenaël Joret , Piotr Micek , Clément Rambaud

Many hard graph problems can be solved efficiently when restricted to graphs of bounded treewidth, and more generally to graphs of bounded clique-width. But there is a price to be paid for this generality, exemplified by the four problems…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-01 Sigve Hortemo Sæther , Jan Arne Telle

Clique-width is one of the graph complexity measures leading to polynomial special-case algorithms for generally NP-complete problems, e.g. graph colourability. The best two currently known algorithms for verifying c-colourability of graphs…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Bruno Courcelle , Irène Durand , Michael Raskin

We show that if $n=7k/i$ with $i \in \{1,2,3\}$ then the cop number of the generalised Petersen graph $GP(n,k)$ is $4$, with some small previously-known exceptions. It was previously proved by Ball et al. (2015) that the cop number of any…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-09-03 Harmony Morris , Joy Morris

The generalized coloring numbers col_r(G) (also denoted by scol_r(G)) and wcol_r(G) of a graph G were introduced by Kierstead and Yang as a generalization of the usual coloring number, and have found important theoretical and algorithmic…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-12-18 Jan van den Heuvel , H. A. Kierstead

A graph class $\mathcal{G}$ has linear growth if, for each graph $G \in \mathcal{G}$ and every positive integer $r$, every subgraph of $G$ with radius at most $r$ contains $O(r)$ vertices. In this paper, we show that every graph class with…

We consider the cop-throttling number of a graph $G$ for the game of Cops and Robbers, which is defined to be the minimum of $(k + \text{capt}_k(G))$, where $k$ is the number of cops and $\text{capt}_k(G)$ is the minimum number of rounds…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Jane Breen , Boris Brimkov , Joshua Carlson , Leslie Hogben , K. E. Perry , Carolyn Reinhart

The \emph{coloring number} $\mathrm{col}(G)$ of a graph $G$, which is equal to the \emph{degeneracy} of $G$ plus one, provides a very useful measure for the uniform sparsity of $G$. The coloring number is generalized by three series of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Sebastian Siebertz

The Colouring problem is that of deciding, given a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, whether $G$ admits a (proper) $k$-colouring. For all graphs $H$ up to five vertices, we classify the computational complexity of Colouring for…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2016-09-06 Konrad K. Dabrowski , François Dross , Daniël Paulusma

We introduce merge-width, a family of graph parameters that unifies several structural graph measures, including treewidth, degeneracy, twin-width, clique-width, and generalized coloring numbers. Our parameters are based on new…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-02-26 Jan Dreier , Szymon Toruńczyk

A clique coloring of a graph is an assignment of colors to its vertices such that no maximal clique is monochromatic. We initiate the study of structural parameterizations of the Clique Coloring problem which asks whether a given graph has…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Lars Jaffke , Paloma T. Lima , Geevarghese Philip

It is proved that for integers $b, r$ such that $3 \leq b < r \leq \binom{b+1}{2} - 1$, there exists a red/blue edge-colored graph such that the red degree of every vertex is $r$, the blue degree of every vertex is $b$, yet in the closed…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-12-15 Yair Caro , Josef Lauri , Xandru Mifsud , Raphael Yuster , Christina Zarb

A strong edge-colouring of a graph is a proper edge-colouring where each colour class induces a matching. It is known that every planar graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ has a strong edge-colouring with at most $4\Delta+4$ colours. We show…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-07-22 Julien Bensmail , Ararat Harutyunyan , Hervé Hocquard , Petru Valicov

Proper conflict-free coloring is an intermediate notion between proper coloring of a graph and proper coloring of its square. It is a proper coloring such that for every non-isolated vertex, there exists a color appearing exactly once in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-16 Chun-Hung Liu

A proper vertex-coloring of a graph is $r$-dynamic if the neighbors of each vertex $v$ receive at least $\min(r, \mathrm{deg}(v))$ different colors. In this note, we prove that if $G$ has a strong $2$-coloring number at most $k$, then $G$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-01-24 Miriam Goetze , Torsten Ueckerdt

We introduce a new variant of the game of Cops and Robbers played on graphs, where the robber is invisible unless outside the neighbor set of a cop. The hyperopic cop number is the corresponding analogue of the cop number, and we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-10-30 A. Bonato , N. E. Clarke , D. Cox , S. Finbow , F. Mc Inerney , M. E. Messinger

(abstract shortened to meet arxiv's length requirements) We investigate two variants of the classical Cops and robber game in graphs, recently introduced by Lee, Mart\'inez-Pedroza, and Rodr\'iguez-Quinche. The two versions are played in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Louis Esperet , Harmender Gahlawat , Ugo Giocanti