English

Making Graphs Irregular through Irregularising Walks

Discrete Mathematics 2025-06-27 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

The 1-2-3 Conjecture, introduced by Karo\'nski, {\L}uczak, and Thomason in 2004, was recently solved by Keusch. This implies that, for any connected graph GG different from K2K_2, we can turn GG into a locally irregular multigraph M(G)M(G), i.e., in which no two adjacent vertices have the same degree, by replacing some of its edges with at most three parallel edges. In this work, we introduce and study a restriction of this problem under the additional constraint that edges added to GG to reach M(G)M(G) must form a walk (i.e., a path with possibly repeated edges and vertices) of GG. We investigate the general consequences of having this additional constraint, and provide several results of different natures (structural, combinatorial, algorithmic) on the length of the shortest irregularising walks, for general graphs and more restricted classes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.21254,
  title  = {Making Graphs Irregular through Irregularising Walks},
  author = {Julien Bensmail and Romain Bourneuf and Paul Colinot and Samuel Humeau and Timothée Martinod},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.21254},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:34:30.647Z