Abstract
Korpelainen, Lozin, and Razgon conjectured that a hereditary property of graphs which is well-quasi-ordered by the induced subgraph order and defined by only finitely many minimal forbidden induced subgraphs is labelled well-quasi-ordered, a notion stronger than that of n-well-quasi-order introduced by Pouzet in the 1970s. We present a counterexample to this conjecture. In fact, we exhibit a hereditary property of graphs which is well-quasi-ordered by the induced subgraph order and defined by finitely many minimal forbidden induced subgraphs yet is not 2-well-quasi-ordered. This counterexample is based on the widdershins spiral, which has received some study in the area of permutation patterns.
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Notes
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For this reason, Proposition 1.1 can be strengthened to state that every 2-wqo class of graphs is defined by finitely many minimal forbidden induced subgraphs.
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V. Vatter: Vatter’s research was sponsored by the National Security Agency under Grant number H98230-16-1-0324. The United States Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints not-withstanding any copyright notation herein.
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Brignall, R., Engen, M. & Vatter, V. A Counterexample Regarding Labelled Well-Quasi-Ordering. Graphs and Combinatorics 34, 1395–1409 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00373-018-1962-0
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Keywords
- Labelled well-quasi-order
- Permutation graph
- Well-quasi-order
- Widdershins spiral