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Colouring Square-Free Graphs without Long Induced Paths

Authors Serge Gaspers, Shenwei Huang, Daniel Paulusma

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Serge Gaspers
Shenwei Huang
Daniel Paulusma

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Serge Gaspers, Shenwei Huang, and Daniel Paulusma. Colouring Square-Free Graphs without Long Induced Paths. In 35th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 96, pp. 35:1-35:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2018.35

Abstract

The Colouring problem is to decide if the vertices of a graph can be coloured with at most k colours for a given integer k such that no two adjacent vertices are coloured alike. The complexity of Colouring is fully understood for graph classes characterized by one forbidden induced subgraph H. Despite a huge body of existing work, there are still major complexity gaps if two induced subgraphs H_1 and H_2 are forbidden. We let H_1 be the s-vertex cycle C_s and H_2 be the t-vertex path P_t. We show that Colouring is polynomial-time solvable for s=4 and t<=6, which unifies several known results for Colouring on (H_1,H_2)-free graphs. Our algorithm is based on a novel decomposition theorem for (C_4,P_6)-free graphs without clique cutsets into homogeneous pairs of sets and a new framework for bounding the clique-width of a graph by the clique-width of its subgraphs induced by homogeneous pairs of sets. To apply this framework, we also need to use divide-and-conquer to bound the clique-width of subgraphs induced by homogeneous pairs of sets. To complement our positive result we also prove that Colouring is NP-complete for s=4 and t>=9, which is the first hardness result on Colouring for (C_4,P_t)-free graphs.

Subject Classification

Keywords
  • graph colouring
  • hereditary graph class
  • clique-width
  • cycle
  • path

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