Rosenfeld Conjectured in 1972 that there exists an integer K $\geq$ 8 such that any tournament of order n $\geq$ K contains any Hamiltonian oriented path. In 2000, Havet and Thomassé proved this conjecture for any tournament with exactly 3 exceptions. We give a simplified proof of this fact.
Rosenfeld in 1974 conjectured that there is an integer N > 8 such that every tournament of order n > N contains every non-directed cycle of order n. We prove that, with exactly 35 exceptions, every tournament of order n > 2 contains each non-directed cycle of order m, 2 < m < n+1.
We prove that a tournament and its complement contain the same number of oriented Hamiltonian paths (resp. cycles) of any given type, as a generalization of Rosenfeld's result proved for antidirected paths.
Sumner's universal tournament conjecture states that any tournament on $2n-2$ vertices contains any directed tree on $n$ vertices. In this paper we prove that this conjecture holds for all sufficiently large $n$. The proof makes extensive use of results and ideas from a recent paper by the same authors, in which an approximate version of the conjecture was proved.
A celebrated unresolved conjecture of Erdös and Hajnal states that for every undirected graph $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every undirected graph on $ n $ vertices that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or a stable set of size at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. The conjecture has a directed equivalent version stating that for every tournament $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every $H-$free $n-$vertex tournament $T$ contains a transitive subtournament of order at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. Both the directed and the undirected versions of the conjecture are known to be…
A celebrated unresolved conjecture of Erdős and Hajnal states that for every undirected graph $H$ there exists $ε(H)>0$ such that every undirected graph on $n$ vertices that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or stable set of size at least $n^{ε(H)}$. The conjecture has a directed equivalent version stating that for every tournament $H$ there exists $ε(H)>0$ such that every $H$-free $n$-vertex tournament $T$ contains a transitive subtournament of order at least $n^{ε(H)}$. We say that a tournament is \textit{prime} if it does not have nontrivial homogeneous sets. So …
The Erdős-Hajnal Conjecture states that for every $H$ there exists a constant $ε(H)>0$ such that every graph $G$ that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or a stable set of size at least $|V(G)|^{ε(H)}$. The Conjecture is still open. Some time ago its directed version was formulated (see:\cite{alon}). In the directed version graphs are replaced by tournaments, and cliques and stable sets by transitive subtournaments. If the Conjecture is not true then the smallest counterexample is a prime tournament. For a long time the Conjecture was known only for finitely many pri…
In 2010, N. Lichiardopol conjectured for $q \geq 3$ and $k \geq 1$ that any tournament with minimum out-degree at least $(q-1)k-1$ contains $k$ disjoint cycles of length $q$. We prove this conjecture for $q \geq 5$. Since it is already known to hold for $q\le4$, this completes the proof of the conjecture.
The celebrated Erdös-Hajnal conjecture states that for every undirected graph $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every undirected graph on $ n $ vertices that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or a stable set of size at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. This conjecture has a directed equivalent version stating that for every tournament $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every $H$-free $n$-vertex tournament $T$ contains a transitive subtournament of order at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. This conjecture is proved for few infinite families of tournaments. In this paper we construct…
Sumner's universal tournament conjecture states that any tournament on $2n-2$ vertices contains a copy of any directed tree on $n$ vertices. We prove an asymptotic version of this conjecture, namely that any tournament on $(2+o(1))n$ vertices contains a copy of any directed tree on $n$ vertices. In addition, we prove an asymptotically best possible result for trees of bounded degree, namely that for any fixed $Δ$, any tournament on $(1+o(1))n$ vertices contains a copy of any directed tree on $n$ vertices with maximum degree at most $Δ$.
Seymour's Second Neighborhood Conjecture asserts that every digraph (without digons) has a vertex whose first out-neighborhood is at most as large as its second out-neighborhood. We prove its weighted version for tournaments missing a generalized star. As a consequence the weighted version holds for tournaments missing a sun, star, or a complete graph.
We consider a generalisation of Kelly's conjecture which is due to Alspach, Mason, and Pullman from 1976. Kelly's conjecture states that every regular tournament has an edge decomposition into Hamilton cycles, and this was proved by Kühn and Osthus for large tournaments. The conjecture of Alspach, Mason, and Pullman asks for the minimum number of paths needed in a path decomposition of a general tournament $T$. There is a natural lower bound for this number in terms of the degree sequence of $T$ and it is conjectured that this bound is correct for tournaments of even order. Almost all cases of…
Erdös-Hajnal conjecture states that for every undirected graph $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every undirected graph on $ n $ vertices that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or a stable set of size at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. This conjecture has a directed equivalent version stating that for every tournament $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every $H-$free $n-$vertex tournament $T$ contains a transitive subtournament of order at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. This conjecture is known to hold for a few infinite families of tournaments. In this paper we construct two n…
The Bermond-Thomassen conjecture states that, for any positive integer $r$, a digraph of minimum out-degree at least $2r-1$ contains at least $r$ vertex-disjoint directed cycles. In 2014, Bang-Jensen, Bessy and Thomass\' e proved the conjecture for tournaments. In 2010, Lichiardopol conjectured that a tournament $T$ with minimum out-degree at least $(q-1)r-1$ contains at least $r$ vertex-disjoint $q$-cycles, where integer $q\geq3$ and $r\geq1$. In this paper, we address Lichiardopol's conjecture affirmatively. In particular, the case $q=3$ implies Bermond-Thomassen conjecture for tournaments.
A regular bipartite tournament is an orientation of a complete balanced bipartite graph $K_{2n,2n}$ where every vertex has its in- and outdegree both equal to $n$. In 1981, Jackson conjectured that any regular bipartite tournament can be decomposed into Hamilton cycles. We prove this conjecture for all sufficiently large bipartite tournaments. Along the way, we also prove several further results, including a conjecture of Liebenau and Pehova on Hamilton decompositions of dense bipartite digraphs.
Thomassen conjectured that there is a function $f(k)$ such that every strongly $f(k)$-connected tournament contains $k$ edge-disjoint Hamiltonian cycles. This conjecture was recently proved by Kühn, Lapinskas, Osthus, and Patel who showed that $f(k)\leq O(k^2(\log k)^2)$ and conjectured that there is a constant $C$ such that $f(k)\leq Ck^2$. We prove this conjecture.
A conjecture of Thomassen from 1982 states that for every k there is an f(k) so that every strongly f(k)-connected tournament contains k edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. A classical theorem of Camion, that every strongly connected tournament contains a Hamilton cycle, implies that f(1)=1. So far, even the existence of f(2) was open. In this paper, we prove Thomassen's conjecture by showing that f(k)=O(k^2*log^2(k)). This is best possible up to the logarithmic factor. As a tool, we show that every strongly 10^4*k*log(k)-connected tournament is k-linked (which improves a previous exponential bound…
A celebrated unresolved conjecture of Erdös and Hajnal states that for every undirected graph $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every undirected graph on $ n $ vertices that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or a stable set of size at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. This conjecture has a directed equivalent version stating that for every tournament $H$ there exists $ ε(H) > 0 $ such that every $H-$free $n-$vertex tournament $T$ contains a transitive subtournament of size at least $ n^{ε(H)} $. Recently the conjecture was proved for all six-vertex tournaments, except $K_{6…
In 1976, Alspach, Mason, and Pullman conjectured that any tournament $T$ of even order can be decomposed into exactly ${\rm ex}(T)$ paths, where ${\rm ex}(T):= \frac{1}{2}\sum_{v\in V(T)}|d_T^+(v)-d_T^-(v)|$. We prove this conjecture for all sufficiently large tournaments. We also prove an asymptotically optimal result for tournaments of odd order.
A conjecture of Alon, Pach and Solymosi, which is equivalent to the celebrated Erdős-Hajnal Conjecture, states that for every tournament $S$ there exists $ε(S)>0$ such that if $T$ is an $n$-vertex tournament that does not contains $S$ as a subtournament, then $T$ contains a transitive subtournament on at least $n^{ε(S)}$ vertices. Let $C_5$ be the unique five-vertex tournament where every vertex has two inneighbors and two outneighbors. The Alon-Pach-Solymosi conjecture is known to be true for the case when $S=C_5$. Here we prove a strengthening of this result, showing that in every tournament…
In this work we present a version of the so called Chen and Chvátal's conjecture for directed graphs. A line of a directed graph D is defined by an ordered pair (u, v), with u and v two distinct vertices of D, as the set of all vertices w such that u, v, w belong to a shortest directed path in D containing a shortest directed path from u to v. A line is empty if there is no directed path from u to v. Another option is that a line is the set of all vertices. The version of the Chen and Chvátal's conjecture we study states that if none of previous options hold, then the number of distinct lines …
Linial and Morgenstern conjectured that, among all $n$-vertex tournaments with $d\binom{n}{3}$ cycles of length three, the number of cycles of length four is asymptotically minimized by a random blow-up of a transitive tournament with all but one part of equal size and one smaller part. We prove the conjecture for $d\ge 1/36$ by analyzing the possible spectrum of adjacency matrices of tournaments. We also demonstrate that the family of extremal examples is broader than expected and give its full description for $d\ge 1/16$.
The Erdős-Hajnal conjecture states that for every given undirected graph $H$ there exists a constant $c(H)>0$ such that every graph $G$ that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or a stable set of size at least $|V(G)|^{c(H)}$. The conjecture is still open. Its equivalent directed version states that for every given tournament $H$ there exists a constant $c(H)>0$ such that every $H$-free tournament $T$ contains a transitive subtournament of order at least $|V(T)|^{c(H)}$. We prove in this paper that $\{H_{1},H_{2}\}$-free tournaments $T$ contain transitive subtournamen…
Seymour's distance two conjecture states that in any digraph there exists a vertex (a "Seymour vertex") that has at least as many neighbors at distance two as it does at distance one. We explore the validity of probabilistic statements along lines suggested by Seymour's conjecture, proving that almost surely there are a "large" number of Seymour vertices in random tournaments and "even more" in general random digraphs.
In 1982 Thomassen asked whether there exists an integer f(k,t) such that every strongly f(k,t)-connected tournament T admits a partition of its vertex set into t vertex classes V_1,...,V_t such that for all i the subtournament T[V_i] induced on T by V_i is strongly k-connected. Our main result implies an affirmative answer to this question. In particular we show that f(k,t) = O(k^7 t^4) suffices. As another application of our main result we give an affirmative answer to a question of Song as to whether, for any integer t, there exists an integer h(t) such that every strongly h(t)-connected tou…
The study of problems concerning subdivisions of graphs has a rich history in extremal combinatorics. Confirming a conjecture of Burr and Erdős, Alon proved in 1994 that subdivided graphs have linear Ramsey numbers. Later, Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov showed that every $n$-vertex graph with at least $\varepsilon n^2$ edges contains a $1$-subdivision of the complete graph on $c_{\varepsilon}\sqrt{n}$ vertices, resolving another old conjecture of Erdős. In this paper we consider the directed analogue of these problems and show that every tournament on at least $(2+o(1))k^2$ vertices contains th…
Sullivan stated the conjectures: (1) every oriented graph $D$ has a vertex $x$ such that $d^{++}(x)\geq d^{-}(x)$; (2) every oriented graph $D$ has a vertex $x$ such that $d^{++}(x)+d^{+}(x)\geq 2d^{-}(x)$. In this paper, we prove that these conjectures hold for local tournaments. In particular, for a local tournament $D$, we prove that $D$ has at least two vertices satisfying $(1)$ if $D$ has no vertex of in-degree zero. And, for a local tournament $D$, we prove that either there exist two vertices satisfying $(2)$ or there exists a vertex $v$ satisfying $d^{++}(v)+d^{+}(v)\geq 2d^{-}(v)+2$ i…
We consider the following Turán-type problem: given a fixed tournament $H$, what is the least integer $t=t(n,H)$ so that adding $t$ edges to any $n$-vertex tournament, results in a digraph containing a copy of $H$. Similarly, what is the least integer $t=t(T_n,H)$ so that adding $t$ edges to the $n$-vertex transitive tournament, results in a digraph containing a copy of $H$. Besides proving several results on these problems, our main contributions are the following: (1) Pach and Tardos conjectured that if $M$ is an acyclic $0/1$ matrix, then any $n \times n$ matrix with $n(\log n)^{O(1)}$ entr…
We study time scheduling problems with allowed absences as a new kind of graph coloring problem. One may think of a sport tournament where each player (each team) is permitted a certain number $t$ of absences. We then examine how many rounds are needed to schedule the whole tournament in the worst case. This upper limit depends on $t$ and on the structure of the graph $G$ whose edges represent the games that have to be played, but also on whether or not the absences are announced before the tournament starts. Therefore, we actually have two upper limits for the number of required rounds. We ha…
We prove the existence of a function $h(k)$ such that every simple digraph with minimum outdegree greater than $h(k)$ contains an immersion of the transitive tournament on $k$ vertices. This solves a conjecture of Devos, McDonald, Mohar and Scheide.
We show that if $T$ is a strongly $10^9k^6\log(2k)$-connected tournament, there exists a partition $A, B$ of $V(T)$ such that each of $T[A]$, $T[B]$ and $T[A,B]$ is strongly $k$-connected. This provides tournament analogues of two partition conjectures of Thomassen regarding highly connected graphs.
Reid conjectured that any finite set of non-negative integers is the score set of some tournament and Yao gave a non-constructive proof of Reid's conjecture using arithmetic arguments. No constructive proof has been found since. In this paper, we investigate a related problem, namely, which sets of integers are imbalance sets of tournaments. We completely solve the tournament imbalance set problem (TIS) and also estimate the minimal order of a tournament realizing an imbalance set. Our proofs are constructive and provide a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to realize any imbalance set. Along th…
We prove that, with high probability, any $2$-edge-colouring of a random tournament on $n$ vertices contains a monochromatic path of length $Ω(n / \sqrt{\log n})$. This resolves a conjecture of Ben-Eliezer, Krivelevich and Sudakov and implies a nearly tight upper bound on the oriented size Ramsey number of a directed path.
We prove Seymour's Second Neighborhood Conjecture when the missing graph is disjoint stars under some conditions. Weaker conditions are required when n=2 or 3. In some cases, we exhibit two vertices with the desired property.
We prove that there exists a function $f:\mathbb{N} \rightarrow \mathbb{N}$ such that for any positive integer $k$, if $T$ is a strongly $4k$-connected tournament with minimum out-degree at least $f(k)$, then $T$ is $k$-linked. This makes progress towards resolving a conjecture of Pokrovskiy. Along the way, we show that a tournament with sufficiently large minimum out-degree contains a subdivision of a complete directed graph. This result may be of independent interest.
Akin to the Erdős-Rademacher problem, Linial and Morgenstern made the following conjecture in tournaments: for any $d\in (0,1]$, among all $n$-vertex tournaments with $d\binom{n}{3}$ many 3-cycles, the number of 4-cycles is asymptotically minimized by a special random blow-up of a transitive tournament. Recently, Chan, Grzesik, Král' and Noel introduced spectrum analysis of adjacency matrices of tournaments in this study, and confirmed this for $d\geq 1/36$. In this paper, we investigate the analogous problem of minimizing the number of cycles of a given length. We prove that for integers $\el…
Seymour's Second Neighborhood Conjecture asserts that every digraph (without digons) has a vertex whose first out-neighborhood is at most as large as its second out-neighborhood. It is proved for tournaments, tournaments missing a matching and tournaments missing a generalized star. We prove this conjecture for classes of digraphs whose missing graph is a comb, a complete graph minus 2 independent edges, or a complete graph minus the edges of a cycle of length 5.
We survey some recent results on long-standing conjectures regarding Hamilton cycles in directed graphs, oriented graphs and tournaments. We also combine some of these to prove the following approximate result towards Kelly's conjecture on Hamilton decompositions of regular tournaments: the edges of every regular tournament can be covered by a set of Hamilton cycles which are `almost' edge-disjoint. We also highlight the role that the notion of `robust expansion' plays in several of the proofs. New and old open problems are discussed.
We prove that there exists $C>0$ such that any $(n+Ck)$-vertex tournament contains a copy of every $n$-vertex oriented tree with $k$ leaves, improving the previously best known bound of $n+O(k^2)$ vertices to give a result tight up to the value of $C$. Furthermore, we show that, for each $k$, there exists $n_0$, such that, whenever $n\geqslant n_0$, any $(n+k-2)$-vertex tournament contains a copy of every $n$-vertex oriented tree with at most $k$ leaves, confirming a conjecture of Dross and Havet.
Forward Arc Maximization for Hamilton Oriented Cycles and Paths in Generalizations of Tournaments
Center for Combinatorics and LPMC, Nankai University(南开大学组合数学中心与LPMC);School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University(南开大学数学科学学院与LPMC);School of Science, Hebei University of Technology(河北工业大学理学院);Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Southern Denmark(南丹麦大学数学与计算机系);Department of Mathematics, University of Johannesburg(约翰内斯堡大学数学系);Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology(深圳先进技术研究院)
A digraph $D$ is $k$-linked if it satisfies that for every choice of disjoint sets $\{x_1,\ldots{},x_k\}$ and $\{y_1,\ldots{},y_k\}$ of vertices of $D$ there are vertex disjoint paths $P_1,\ldots{},P_k$ such that $P_i$ is an $(x_i,y_i)$-path. Confirming a conjecture by Kühn et al, Pokrovskiy proved in 2015 that every $452k$-strong tournament is $k$-linked and asked for a better linear bound. Very recently Meng et al proved that every $(40k-31)$-strong tournament is $k$-linked. In this note we use an important lemma from their paper to give a short proof that every $(13k-6)$-strong tournament o…
Given a tournament $T$, a module of $T$ is a subset $X$ of $V(T)$ such that for $x, y\in X$ and $v\in V(T)\setminus X$, $(x,v)\in A(T)$ if and only if $(y,v)\in A(T)$. The trivial modules of $T$ are $\emptyset$, $\{u\}$ $(u\in V(T))$ and $V(T)$. The tournament $T$ is indecomposable if all its modules are trivial; otherwise it is decomposable. The decomposability index of $T$, denoted by $δ(T)$, is the smallest number of arcs of $T$ that must be reversed to make $T$ indecomposable. The first author conjectured that for $n \geq 5$, we have $δ(n) = \left\lceil \frac{n+1}{4} \right\rceil$, where $…
An edge coloring of a tournament $T$ with colors $1,2,\dots,k$ is called \it $k$-transitive \rm if the digraph $T(i)$ defined by the edges of color $i$ is transitively oriented for each $1\le i \le k$. We explore a conjecture of the second author: For each positive integer $k$ there exists a (least) $p(k)$ such that every $k$-transitive tournament has a dominating set of at most $p(k)$ vertices. We show how this conjecture relates to other conjectures and results. For example, it is a special case of a well-known conjecture of Erd\H os, Sands, Sauer and Woodrow (so the conjecture is interestin…
Brandt et al. (2013) have recently disproved a conjecture by Schwartz (1990) by non-constructively showing the existence of a counterexample with about 10^136 alternatives. We provide a concrete counterexample for Schwartz's conjecture with only 24 alternatives.
An open conjecture of Erdős states that for every positive integer $k$ there is a (least) positive integer $f(k)$ so that whenever a tournament has its edges colored with $k$ colors, there exists a set $S$ of at most $f(k)$ vertices so that every vertex has a monochromatic path to some point in $S$. We consider a related question and show that for every (finite or infinite) cardinal $κ>0$ there is a cardinal $ λ_κ$ such that in every $κ$-edge-coloured tournament there exist disjoint vertex sets $K,S$ with total size at most $ λ_κ$ so that every vertex $ v $ has a monochromatic path of length a…
Solving the kernel perfect problem by (simple) forbidden subdigraphs for digraphs in some families of generalized tournaments and generalized bipartite tournaments
A long-standing conjecture of Kelly states that every regular tournament on n vertices can be decomposed into (n-1)/2 edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. We prove this conjecture for large n. In fact, we prove a far more general result, based on our recent concept of robust expansion and a new method for decomposing graphs. We show that every sufficiently large regular digraph G on n vertices whose degree is linear in n and which is a robust outexpander has a decomposition into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. This enables us to obtain numerous further results, e.g. as a special case we confirm a con…
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 $Ω(\frac{n}{\log(n)})$. 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 $e^{O(\log(n)^{2})}$ that constructs colorings of $H$-free tournaments using only $O(n…