Polymath16, seventeenth thread: Declaring victory

This is the seventeenth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

At this point, we are finalizing a draft of a paper by D.H.J. Polymath. Like Aubrey’s original paper, this will be submitted for publication in Geombinatorics.

This post concludes the Polymath16 project. Of course, we anticipate that folks will continue to make progress on this problem on their own. If you’d like to update the Polymath16 community about your progress, feel free to comment on this post.

I asked Aubrey to offer a few words to reflect on our project:

Polymath16, sixteenth thread: Writing the paper and chasing down loose ends, II

This is the sixteenth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

The paper writing has found a second wind between Philip Gibbs, Aubrey de Grey, Jaan Parts and Tom Sirgedas. For reference, I wanted to compile a list of related publications that have emerged since starting our project. (Feel free to any references I missed in the comments.) There has certainly been a bit of activity since Aubrey’s paper first hit the arXiv two years ago!

P. Ágoston, Probabilistic formulation of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem.

F. Bock, Epsilon-colorings of strips, Acta Math. Univ. Comenianae (2019) 88: 469-473.

G. Exoo, D. Ismailescu, A 6-chromatic two-distance graph in the plane, arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.13177 (2019).

G. Exoo, D. Ismailescu, The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5: A new proof, Discrete & Computational Geometry (2019): 1-11.

G. Exoo, D. Ismailescu, The Hadwiger-Nelson problem with two forbidden distances, arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06055 (2018).

N. Frankl, T. Hubai, D. Pálvölgyi, Almost-monochromatic sets and the chromatic number of the plane, arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.02604 (2019).

M. J. H. Heule, Computing a Smaller Unit-Distance Graph with Chromatic Number 5 via Proof Trimming, arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.00929 (2019).

M. J. H. Heule, Searching for a Unit-Distance Graph with Chromatic Number 6, SAT COMPETITION 2018: 66.

M. J. H. Heule, Trimming Graphs Using Clausal Proof Optimization, In International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, pp. 251-267. Springer, Cham, 2019.

J. Parts. A small 6-chromatic two-distance graph in the plane, Geombinatorics, vol. 29, No. 3 (2020), pp.111-115.

J. Parts. Graph minimization, focusing on the example of 5-chromatic unit-distance graphs in the plane, Geombinatorics, vol. 29, No. 4 (2020), pp.137-166.

Polymath16, fifteenth thread: Writing the paper and chasing down loose ends

This is the fifteenth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

At this point, much of the effort is transitioning to the writing stage, which is taking place on Overleaf. See this comment to obtain writing privileges for the paper. This thread can be used to discuss the write-up as well as any remaining research items.

Polymath16, fourteenth thread: Automated graph minimization?

This is the fourteenth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

The biggest development in the previous thread:

• The smallest known 5-chromatic unit distance graph has 510 vertices and 2508 edges.

The method used for finding this graph is vaguely described here and here. It seems that the method is currently more of an art form than an algorithm. A next step might be to automate the art away, code up any computational speedups that are available, and then throw more computing power at the problem.

Polymath16, thirteenth thread: Bumping the deadline?

This is the thirteenth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

Interest in this project has spiked since approaching (and passing) our original deadline of April 15. For this reason, I propose we extend the deadline to October 15, 2019. We can discuss this in the Polymath proposal page.

Here are some recent developments:

• The fractional chromatic number of the plane is at least 3.98.
• The smallest known 5-chromatic unit distance graph has 529 vertices and 2630 edges.
• Dömötör has an exciting idea for finding a human-verifiable proof that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5.

I’m interested to see if this last point has legs!

Polymath16, eleventh thread: Chromatic numbers of planar sets

This is the eleventh “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

Here’s a brief summary of the progress made in the previous thread:

– Let w(k) denote the supremum of w such that is k-colorable. Then of course and for every . Furthermore,

Colorings that produce these lower bounds are depicted here. The upper bound for k=3 is given here.

– The largest known k-colorable disks for k=2,3,4,5 are depicted here.

Presumably, we can obtain descent upper bounds on w(4) by restricting (a finite subset of) the ring to an infinite strip.

Polymath16, tenth thread: Open SAT instances

This is the tenth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

Here’s a brief summary of the progress made in the previous thread:

– We have new results in the probabilistic formulation, namely, Proposition 36 and Lemmas 38 and 39.

– Jaan Parts refined Pritikin’s analysis to prove that every unit-distance graph with at most 24 vertices is 5-colorable, and every such graph with at most 6906 vertices is 6-colorable.

– Domotor, Frankl and Hubai showed that, if there exists a k-chromatic unit-distance graph with a bichromatic origin such that all its neighbors are in the upper half-plane and all their coordinates are rational, then CNP is at least k.

Polymath16, ninth thread: Searching for a 6-coloring

This is the ninth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

Here’s a brief summary of the progress made in the previous thread:

– We can now 6-color .

– We now have a laundry list of necessary conditions for a certain family of tile-based 6-colorings of the plane.

The next step is to search for a 6-coloring of the plane. The basic idea is to build up colored plane graphs and prune with our necessary conditions. We were hoping that existing code to generate plane graphs (namely, plantri) could be used as a blackbox for this search, but after further inspection, it seems that we’ll have to write this code ourselves. (When building up plane graphs, we will be adding vertices to the outer face, whereas plantri treats all faces equally.)

Polymath16, eighth thread: More upper bounds

This is the eighth “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

Here’s a brief summary of the progress made in the previous thread:

– We can now 4-color the disk of radius 0.869, 5-color the disk of radius 1.1, and 6-color the disk of radius 1.85, though it appears that a larger disk is 6-colorable.

– We now have a human proof that for .

There is ongoing work to improve Thomassen’s result so that the tiles need not be strictly smaller than 1 nor have distance strictly larger than 1. This would produce new obstructions to 6-coloring the plane.

Polymath16, seventh thread: Upper bounds

This is the seventh “research” thread of the Polymath16 project to make progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, continuing this post. This project is a follow-up to Aubrey de Grey’s breakthrough result that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature should continue in the Polymath proposal page. We will summarize progress on the Polymath wiki page.

Here’s a brief summary of the progress made in the previous thread:

– The smallest known unit-distance graph now has 553 vertices and 2722 edges.

– Terry Tao made some progress on understanding the colorings of .