A k-coloring of a tournament is a partition of its vertices into k acyclic sets. Deciding if a tournament is 2-colorable is NP-hard. A natural problem, akin to that of coloring a 3-colorable graph with few colors, is to color a 2-colorable tournament with few colors. This problem does not seem to have been addressed before, although it is a special case of coloring a 2-colorable 3-uniform hypergraph with few colors, which is a well-studied problem with super-constant lower bounds. We present an efficient decomposition lemma for tournaments and show that it can be used to design polynomial-time algorithms to color various classes of tournaments with few colors, including an algorithm to color a 2-colorable tournament with ten colors. For the classes of tournaments considered, we complement our upper bounds with strengthened lower bounds, painting a comprehensive picture of the algorithmic and complexity aspects of coloring tournaments.
@InProceedings{klingelhoefer_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2023.71, author = {Klingelhoefer, Felix and Newman, Alantha}, title = {{Coloring Tournaments with Few Colors: Algorithms and Complexity}}, booktitle = {31st Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2023)}, pages = {71:1--71:14}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-295-2}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2023}, volume = {274}, editor = {G{\o}rtz, Inge Li and Farach-Colton, Martin and Puglisi, Simon J. and Herman, Grzegorz}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.71}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-187247}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.71}, annote = {Keywords: Tournaments, Graph Coloring, Algorithms, Complexity} }
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