The condensation phase transition in random graph coloring

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The condensation phase transition in random graph coloring (scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6544482)



Abstract: Based on a non-rigorous formalism called the "cavity method", physicists have put forward intriguing predictions on phase transitions in discrete structures. One of the most remarkable ones is that in problems such as random k-SAT or random graph k-coloring, very shortly before the threshold for the existence of solutions there occurs another phase transition called "condensation" [Krzakala et al., PNAS 2007]. The existence of this phase transition appears to be intimately related to the difficulty of proving precise results on, e.g., the k-colorability threshold as well as to the performance of message passing algorithms. In random graph k-coloring, there is a precise conjecture as to the location of the condensation phase transition in terms of a distributional fixed point problem. In this paper we prove this conjecture for k exceeding a certain constant k0.


The cavity method is a non-rigorous approach which has been proposed to study diluted mean-field models, in which the geometry of interactions is described by a sparse random graph or hypergraph. The specific model therein considered is the Potts antiferromagnet on the Erdős-Renyi random graph at zero temperature known as the random graph coloring problem. The contribution of the present paper is to prove that, in the random graph coloring problem, condensation occurs at the exact value predicted by the cavity method. The key of the proof is to establish an explicit link between the combinatorics of the graph coloring problem and the cavity formalism.




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