On the colorability of bi-hypergraphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the colorability of bi-hypergraphs, establishing conditions under which they are colorable and identifying minimal uncolorable cases, thus advancing understanding of their combinatorial properties.

Contribution

It applies Lovász local lemma to show colorability conditions for r-uniform bi-hypergraphs and determines the minimal size of uncolorable 3-uniform bi-hypergraphs, answering longstanding questions.

Findings

r-uniform bi-hypergraphs with certain edge incidences are colorable

minimum size of uncolorable 3-uniform bi-hypergraphs is ten

constructed minimal uncolorable 3-uniform bi-hypergraphs of order n and size at most (7n/3)-4

Abstract

A {\it mixed hypergraph} ${\cal H}=({\cal V},{\cal C},{\cal D})$ consists of the vertex set ${\cal V}$ and two families of subsets of $2^{{\cal V}}$: the family ${\cal C}$ of co-edges and the family ${\cal D}$ of edges. ${\cal H}$ is said to be colorable if there is a mapping $f$ from ${\cal V}$ to the set of positive integers such that $|\{f(v):v\in e\}|<|e|$ for each $e\in {\cal C}$ and $|\{f(v):v\in e\}|>1$ for each $e\in {\cal D}$. There exist mixed hypergraphs which are uncolorable, and quite little about these mixed hypergraphs is known. A mixed hypergraph is called a bi-hypergraph if its co-edge set and edge set are the same. In this article, we first apply Lov\'asz local lemma to show that any $r$-uniform bi-hypergraph with $r\ge 4$ is colorable if every edge is incident to less than $(r-1)^{r-1}e^{-1}-1$ other edges, where $e$ is the base of natural logarithms. Then, we show that among all the uncolorable $3$-uniform bi-hypergraphs, the smallest size of a minimal one is ten, which answers a question raised by Tuza and Voloshin in 2000. As an extension, we provide a minimal uncolorable $3$-uniform bi-hypergraph of order $n$ and size at most $\frac{7n}3-4$ for every $n\ge 6$.