Nonrepetitive Graph Colouring

A vertex colouring of a graph $G$ is nonrepetitive if $G$ contains no path for which the first half of the path is assigned the same sequence of colours as the second half. Thue's famous theorem says that every path is nonrepetitively 3-colourable. This paper surveys results about nonrepetitive colourings of graphs. The goal is to give a unified and comprehensive presentation of the major results and proof methods, as well as to highlight numerous open problems.

Mixed graph colouring as scheduling multi-processor tasks with equal processing times

A problem of scheduling partially ordered unit-time tasks processed on dedicated machines is formulated as a mixed graph colouring problem, i. e., as an assignment of integers (colours) {1, 2, …, t} to the vertices (tasks) V {ν1, ν2, …, νn}, of the mixed graph G = (V, A, E) such that if vertices vp and vq are joined by an edge [νp, νq] ∈ E their colours have to be different. Further, if two vertices νp and νq are joined by an arc (νi, νj) ∈ A the colour of vertex νi has to be no greater than the colour of vertex νj. We prove that an optimal colouring of a mixed graph G = (V, A, E) is equivalent to the scheduling problem GcMPT|pi = 1|Cmax of finding an optimal schedule for partially ordered multi-processor tasks with unit (equal) processing times. Contrary to classical shop-scheduling problems, several dedicated machines are required to process an individual task in the scheduling problem GcMPT|pi = 1|Cmax. Moreover, along with precedence constraints given on the set V {ν1, ν2, …, νn}, it is required that a subset of tasks must be processed simultaneously. Due to the theorems proved in this article, most analytical results that have been proved for the scheduling problems GcMPT |pi = 1|Cmax so far, have analogous results for optimal colourings of the mixed graphs G = (V, A, E), and vice versa.

Algebraic Approach to Promise Constraint Satisfaction

The complexity and approximability of the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) has been actively studied over the past 20 years. A new version of the CSP, the promise CSP (PCSP), has recently been proposed, motivated by open questions about the approximability of variants of satisfiability and graph colouring. The PCSP significantly extends the standard decision CSP. The complexity of CSPs with a fixed constraint language on a finite domain has recently been fully classified, greatly guided by the algebraic approach, which uses polymorphisms—high-dimensional symmetries of solution spaces—to analyse the complexity of problems. The corresponding classification for PCSPs is wide open and includes some long-standing open questions, such as the complexity of approximate graph colouring, as special cases. The basic algebraic approach to PCSP was initiated by Brakensiek and Guruswami, and in this article, we significantly extend it and lift it from concrete properties of polymorphisms to their abstract properties. We introduce a new class of problems that can be viewed as algebraic versions of the (Gap) Label Cover problem and show that every PCSP with a fixed constraint language is equivalent to a problem of this form. This allows us to identify a “measure of symmetry” that is well suited for comparing and relating the complexity of different PCSPs via the algebraic approach. We demonstrate how our theory can be applied by giving both general and specific hardness/tractability results. Among other things, we improve the state-of-the-art in approximate graph colouring by showing that, for any k ≥ 3, it is NP-hard to find a (2 k -1)-colouring of a given k -colourable graph.