Weak and strong versions of the 1-2-3 conjecture for uniform hypergraphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the 1-2-3 conjecture variants for uniform hypergraphs, showing most are strongly or weakly weighted with small weights, and establishes computational complexity results.

Contribution

It extends the 1-2-3 conjecture framework to hypergraphs, providing probabilistic results and complexity analysis for weighted colorings.

Findings

Almost all 3 or 4-uniform hypergraphs are strongly 2-weighted.

Almost all 5-uniform hypergraphs are either 1 or 2 strongly weighted.

Determining if a hypergraph is strongly 2-weighted is NP-complete.

Abstract

Given an $r$-uniform hypergraph $H=(V,E)$ and a weight function $\omega:E\to\{1,\dots,w\}$, a coloring of vertices of $H$, induced by $\omega$, is defined by $c(v) = \sum_{e\ni v} w(e)$ for all $v\in V$. If there exists such a coloring that is strong (that means in each edge no color appears more than once), then we say that $H$ is strongly $w$-weighted. Similarly, if the coloring is weak (that means there is no monochromatic edge), then we say that $H$ is weakly $w$-weighted. In this paper, we show that almost all 3 or 4-uniform hypergraphs are strongly 2-weighted (but not 1-weighted) and almost all $5$-uniform hypergraphs are either 1 or 2 strongly weighted (with a nontrivial distribution). Furthermore, for $r\ge 6$ we show that almost all $r$-uniform hypergraphs are strongly 1-weighted. We complement these results by showing that almost all 3-uniform hypergraphs are weakly 2-weighted but not 1-weighted and for $r\ge 4$ almost all $r$-uniform hypergraphs are weakly 1-weighted. These results extend a previous work of Addario-Berry, Dalal and Reed for graphs. We also prove general lower bounds and show that there are $r$-uniform hypergraphs which are not strongly $(r^2-r)$-weighted and not weakly 2-weighted. Finally, we show that determining whether a particular uniform hypergraph is strongly 2-weighted is NP-complete.