Coloring tournaments with forbidden substructures

Coloring graphs is an important algorithmic problem in combinatorics with many applications in computer science. In this paper we study coloring tournaments. A chromatic number of a random tournament is of order Ω( n log(n)). The question arises whether the chromatic number can be proven to be smaller for more structured nontrivial classes of tournaments. We analyze the class of tournaments defined by a forbidden subtournament H. This paper gives a first quasi-polynomial algorithm running in time eO(log(n) 2) that constructs colorings of H-free tournaments using only O(n1−ǫ(H) log(n)) colors, where ǫ(H) ≥ 2−2 50|H|2+1 for many forbidden tournaments H. To the best of our knowledge all previously known related results required at least sub-exponential time and relied on the regularity lemma. Since we do not use the regularity lemma, we obtain the first known lower bounds on ǫ(H) that can be given by a closed-form expression. As a corollary, we give a constructive proof of the celebrated open Erdős-Hajnal conjecture with explicitly given lower bounds on the EH coefficients for all classes of prime tournaments for which the conjecture is known. Such a constractive proof was not known before. Thus we significantly reduce the gap between best lower and upper bounds on the EH coefficients from the conjecture for all known prime tournaments that satisfy it. We also briefly explain how our methods may be used for coloring H-free tournaments under the following conditions: H is any tournament with ≤ 5 vertices or: H is any but one tournament of six vertices.