Problems of optimal choice on posets and generalizations of acyclic colourings

Abstract

This dissertation is in two parts, each of three chapters. In Part 1, I shall prove some results concerning variants of the ‘secretary problem’. In Part 2, I shall bound several generalizations of the acyclic chromatic number of a graph as functions of its maximum degree. I shall begin Chapter 1 by describing the classical secretary problem, in which the aim is to select the best candidate for the post of a secretary, and its solution. I shall then summarize some of its many generalizations that have been studied up to now, provide some basic theory, and briefly outline the results that I shall prove. In Chapter 2, I shall suppose that the candidates come as m pairs of equally qualified identical twins. I shall describe an optimal strategy, a formula for its probability of success and the asymptotic behaviour of this strategy and its probability of success as m→∞. I shall also find an optimal strategy and its probability of success for the analagous version with c-tuplets. I shall move away from known posets in Chapter 3, assuming instead that the candidates come from a poset about which the only information known is its size and number of maximal elements. I shall show that, given this information, there is an algorithm that is successful with probability at least 1 e . For posets with k ≥ 2 maximal elements, I shall prove that if their width is also k then this can be improved to k−1 √ 1 k , and show that no better bound of this type is possible. In Chapter 4, I shall describe the history of acyclic colourings, in which a graph must be properly coloured with no two-coloured cycle, and state some results known about them and their variants. In particular, I shall highlight a result of Alon, McDiarmid and Reed, which bounds the acyclic chromatic number of a graph by a function of its maximum degree. My results in the next two chapters are of this form.