On the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture for six-vertex tournaments

preprint2015arXivOpen access

Abstract

A celebrated unresolved conjecture of Erdős and Hajnal states that for every undirected graph HH there exists ε(H)>0ε(H)>0 such that every undirected graph on nn vertices that does not contain HH as an induced subgraph contains a clique or stable set of size at least nε(H)n^{ε(H)}. The conjecture has a directed equivalent version stating that for every tournament HH there exists ε(H)>0ε(H)>0 such that every HH-free nn-vertex tournament TT contains a transitive subtournament of order at least nε(H)n^{ε(H)}. We say that a tournament is \textit{prime} if it does not have nontrivial homogeneous sets. So far the conjecture was proved only for some specific families of prime tournaments (\cite{chorochudber, choromanski2}) and tournaments constructed according to the so-called \textit{substitution procedure}(\cite{alon}). In particular, recently the conjecture was proved for all five-vertex tournaments (\cite{chorochudber}), but the question about the correctness of the conjecture for all six-vertex tournaments remained open. In this paper we prove that all but at most one six-vertex tournament satisfy the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture. That reduces the six-vertex case to a single tournament.

Explore this paper’s authors, topics and related work.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Reviews 0

Write a reviewWrite

No reviews yet.

Discussion 0

Add a commentWrite

No comments yet.