Computing the clique number of tournaments

Abstract

The clique number of a tournament is the maximum clique number of a graph formed by keeping backwards arcs in an ordering of its vertices. We study the time complexity of computing the clique number of a tournament and prove that, for any integer $k\ge 3$, deciding whether a tournament has clique number at most $k$ is NP-complete. This answers an interrogation of Nguyen, Scott and Seymour. To do so, we make use of a construction which we then modify to provide a counterexample to a conjecture of Aboulker, Aubian, Charbit and Lopes.