The Colour Refinement procedure and its generalisation to higher dimensions, the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm, are central subroutines in approaches to the graph isomorphism problem. In an iterative fashion, Colour Refinement computes a colouring of the vertices of its input graph. A trivial upper bound on the iteration number of Colour Refinement on graphs of order n is n-1. We show that this bound is tight. More precisely, we prove via explicit constructions that there are infinitely many graphs G on which Colour Refinement takes |G|-1 iterations to stabilise. Modifying the infinite families that we present, we show that for every natural number n ≥ 10, there are graphs on n vertices on which Colour Refinement requires at least n-2 iterations to reach stabilisation.
@InProceedings{kiefer_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.73, author = {Kiefer, Sandra and McKay, Brendan D.}, title = {{The Iteration Number of Colour Refinement}}, booktitle = {47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2020)}, pages = {73:1--73:19}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-138-2}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2020}, volume = {168}, editor = {Czumaj, Artur and Dawar, Anuj and Merelli, Emanuela}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.73}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-124801}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.73}, annote = {Keywords: Colour Refinement, iteration number, Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm, quantifier depth} }
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