English

Two-round Ramsey games on random graphs

Combinatorics 2023-05-05 v1

Abstract

Motivated by the investigation of sharpness of thresholds for Ramsey properties in random graphs, Friedgut, Kohayakawa, R\"odl, Ruci\'nski and Tetali introduced two variants of a single-player game whose goal is to colour the edges of a~random graph, in an online fashion, so as not to create a monochromatic triangle. In the two-round variant of the game, the player is first asked to find a triangle-free colouring of the edges of a random graph G1G_1 and then extend this colouring to a triangle-free colouring of the union of G1G_1 and another (independent) random graph G2G_2, which is disclosed to the player only after they have coloured G1G_1. Friedgut et al.\ analysed this variant of the online Ramsey game in two instances: when G1G_1 has Θ(n4/3)\Theta(n^{4/3}) edges and when the number of edges of G1G_1 is just below the threshold above which a random graph typically no longer admits a triangle-free colouring, which is located at Θ(n3/2)\Theta(n^{3/2}). The two-round Ramsey game has been recently revisited by Conlon, Das, Lee and M\'esz\'aros, who generalised the result of Friedgut at al.\ from triangles to all strictly 22-balanced graphs. We extend the work of Friedgut et al.\ in an orthogonal direction and analyse the triangle case of the two-round Ramsey game at all intermediate densities. More precisely, for every n4/3pn1/2n^{-4/3} \ll p \ll n^{-1/2}, with the exception of p=Θ(n3/5)p = \Theta(n^{-3/5}), we determine the threshold density qq at which it becomes impossible to extend any triangle-free colouring of a typical G1Gn,pG_1 \sim G_{n,p} to a triangle-free colouring of the union of G1G_1 and G2Gn,qG_2 \sim G_{n,q}. An interesting aspect of our result is that this threshold density qq `jumps' by a polynomial quantity as pp crosses a `critical' window around n3/5n^{-3/5}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.02725,
  title  = {Two-round Ramsey games on random graphs},
  author = {Yahav Alon and Patrick Morris and Wojciech Samotij},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.02725},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

39+3 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:25:31.165Z