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Graph Coloring-I

Graph Coloring-1

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16 views

Graph Coloring-I

Graph Coloring-1

Uploaded by

Salik Ahmad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences

MT-3001 Graph Theory


Instructor: Miss Urooj
GRAPH COLORING
In the previous chapter we discussed the application of graph matching to a problem where items from
two distinct groups must be paired. An important aspect of this pairing is that no item could be paired
more than once.
Basic Problem:
Five student groups are meeting on Saturday, with varying time requirements. The staff at the Campus
Center need to determine how to place the groups into rooms while using the fewest rooms possible.
• Although we can think of this problem as pairing groups with rooms, there is no restriction that a room
can only be used once.
• In fact, to minimize the number of rooms used, we would hope to use a room as often as possible.
Key Topics:
This chapter explores graph coloring, a strategy often used to model resource restrictions.
 We will explore graph coloring in terms of both vertices and edges, though most of our time will be
spent on coloring vertices.
 But before we get into the heart of coloring, we begin with a historically significant problem, known
as the Four-Color Theorem.
FOUR COLOR THEOREM:
Initial Idea:
In 1852 Augustus De Morgan sent a letter to his colleague Sir William Hamilton (the same mathematician
who introduced what we now call hamiltonian cycles) regarding a puzzle presented by one of his students,
Frederick Gutherie (though Gutherie later clarified that the question originated from his brother, Francis).
 One wishes to color the regions in such a way that adjacent regions (i.e., regions sharing some
common boundary) are colored by different colors.
 What is the minimum number of colors needed?
 This question was known for over a century as the Four Color Conjecture, and can be stated as
Any map split into contiguous regions can be colored using at most four colors so that no two bordering
regions are given the same color.

Can all maps be colored with at most four colors? Many people believed that the answer is in the
affirmative, but no one could prove it for a longtime. This is known as the four-color problem.
An important aspect of this conjecture is that a region, such as a country or state, cannot be split into two
disconnected pieces. The Four-Color Conjecture started as a map coloring problem yet migrated into a
graph coloring problem.

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k-coloring:

A 5-coloring, a 4-coloring and a 3-coloring of G are, respectively, shown in (a), (b) and (c) of Fig. 8.2.4.

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Color Classes:

Remark:
Note that each Si is non-empty, every two different color classes are disjoint and𝑉(𝐺) = 𝑆1 ∪ 𝑆2 ∪ … ∪ 𝑆𝑘
Independence Number:

Most problems on graph coloring are optimization problems since we want to minimize the number of
colors used; that is, find the lowest value of k so that G has a proper k-coloring.
The example below demonstrates how a map coloring relates to a vertex coloring of a graph.

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