Chip games and paintability

Abstract

We prove that the difference between the paint number and the choice number of a complete bipartite graph $K_{N,N}$ is $\Theta (\log \log N)$. That answers the question of Zhu (2009) whether this difference, for all graphs, can be bounded by a common constant. By a classical correspondence, our result translates to the framework of on-line coloring of uniform hypergraphs. This way we obtain that for every on-line two coloring algorithm there exists a k-uniform hypergraph with $\Theta (2^k)$ edges on which the strategy fails. The results are derived through an analysis of a natural family of chip games.

Cited by in corpus (1)

• The strong fractional choice number and the strong fractional paint number of graphs