On the majority game chromatic number of forests and other graphs

Abstract

A majority coloring of a graph $G$ is a vertex coloring of $G$ in which no vertex has more than half of its neighbors colored with its own color. The least number of colors required for a majority coloring of $G$ is the majority chromatic number $\mu(G)$. The majority coloring game, introduced by Bosek et al. (2019), is a two-player Maker-Breaker-type game where the players alternately color vertices while maintaining the majority condition at each vertex; the least number of colors required for the first player to have a winning strategy on $G$ is the majority game chromatic number $\mu_g(G)$. In contrast with the static case, Bosek et al. show that $\mu_g(G)$ is unbounded in general, while $\mu_g(G)\le col_g(G)$, where $col_g(G)$ is the game coloring number of $G$. It is known (cf. Faigle et al. (1993)) that, for any acyclic graph $G$, $col_g(G) \leq 4$, so $\mu_g(G) \leq 4$ as well. We improve this bound by showing that $\mu_g(G) \leq 3$ for any acyclic graph $G$ of maximum degree at most $4$. We also show that $\mu_g(G) = 2$ if $G$ is a nonempty path, star, or complete graph, or a disjoint union of such graphs. These improve the results of Bosek et al. We also initiate the study of the computational complexity of the pre-coloring extension problem for the static and game versions of majority coloring. We show that the Majority $k$-precoloring Extension problem is NP-complete for each $k \geq 2$. When $k = 2$, it remains NP-complete on the class of bipartite graphs where maximum degrees of each part are $5$ and $6$, and when $k = 3$ it remains NP-complete on the class of $12$-regular planar graphs. We show that the game version is PSPACE-complete, even when the number of colors $k=\chi(G)$, and even when $k=2$ and $G$ is a bipartite graph in which one part has maximum degree equal to $9$. The results on the game versions also hold for the variation where Bob starts the game.