On the two problems in Ramsey achievement games

TL;DR

This paper investigates the generalized Ramsey achievement game on graphs, establishing bounds for achievement numbers, confirming parts of Harary's conjecture, and analyzing specific graph structures like paths and stars.

Contribution

It provides bounds for achievement numbers of trees and stars, confirms Harary's conjecture for paths, and explores conditions where first player and achievement numbers coincide.

Findings

Achievement number bounds for trees: n ≤ a(p,q;T) ≤ n + q * floor((n-2)/p)

Minimum achievement number occurs for paths, confirming part of Harary's conjecture

For paths, a^*(P_n) equals a(P_n), the achievement and first player achievement numbers are the same

Abstract

Let $p,q$ be two integers with $p\geq q$. Given a finite graph $F$ with no isolated vertices, the generalized Ramsey achievement game of $F$ on the complete graph $K_n$, denoted by $(p,q;K_n,F,+)$, is played by two players called Alice and Bob. In each round, Alice firstly chooses $p$ uncolored edges $e_1,e_2,...,e_p$ and colors it blue, then Bob chooses $q$ uncolored edge $f_1,f_2,...,f_q$ and colors it red; the player who can first complete the formation of $F$ in his (or her) color is the winner. The generalized achievement number of $F$, denoted by ${a}(p,q;F)$ is defined to be the smallest $n$ for which Alice has a winning strategy. If $p=q=1$, then it is denoted by ${a}(F)$, which is the classical achievement number of $F$ introduced by Harary in 1982. If Alice aims to form a blue $F$, and the goal of Bob is to try to stop him, this kind of game is called the first player game by Bollob\'{a}s. Let ${a}^*(F)$ be the smallest positive integer $n$ for which Alice has a winning strategy in the first player game. A conjecture due to Harary states that the minimum value of ${a}(T)$ is realized when $T$ is a path and the maximum value of ${a}(T)$ is realized when $T$ is a star among all trees $T$ of order $n$. He also asked which graphs $F$ satisfy $a^*(F)=a(F)$? In this paper, we proved that $n\leq {a}(p,q;T)\leq n+q\left\lfloor (n-2)/p \right\rfloor$ for all trees $T$ of order $n$, and obtained a lower bound of ${a}(p,q;K_{1,n-1})$, where $K_{1,n-1}$ is a star. We proved that the minimum value of ${a}(T)$ is realized when $T$ is a path which gives a positive solution to the first part of Harary's conjecture, and ${a}(T)\leq 2n-2$ for all trees of order $n$. We also proved that for $n\geq 3$, we have $2n-2-\sqrt{(4n-8)\ln (4n-4)}\leq a(K_{1,n-1})\leq 2n-2$ with the help of a theorem of Alon, Krivelevich, Spencer and Szab\'o. We proved that $a^*(P_n)=a(P_n)$ for a path $P_n$.