Rook's graph


In graph theory, a rook's graph is a graph that represents all legal moves of the rook chess piece on a chessboard. Each vertex of a rook's graph represents a square on a chessboard, and each edge represents a legal move from one square to another. The same graphs can be defined mathematically as the Cartesian products of two complete graphs or as the line graphs of complete bipartite graphs.
Rook's graphs are highly symmetric. For square chessboards they are distance-transitive graphs and distance-regular graphs, while for rectangular chessboards with relatively prime dimensions they are circulant graphs.
They may be characterized in terms of the number of triangles each edge belongs to and by the existence of a -cycle connecting each nonadjacent pair of vertices.
Rook's graphs are perfect graphs, meaning that their induced subgraphs all have chromatic number equal to their clique number.
The induced subgraphs of rook's graphs form one of the key components of a decomposition of perfect graphs used to prove the strong perfect graph theorem characterizing all perfect graphs.
The independence number and domination number of a rook's graph both equal the smaller of its two dimensions, and these are well-covered graphs meaning that every independent set can be extended to a maximum independent set.

Definition

An rook's graph represents the moves of a rook on an chessboard.
Its vertices may be given coordinates, where and. Two vertices and are adjacent if and only if either or ; that is, if they belong to the same rank or the same file of the chessboard.
For an rook's graph the total number of vertices is simply. For an rook's graph the total number of vertices is simply and the total number of edges is ; in this case the graph is also known as a two-dimensional Hamming graph or a Latin square graph.
The rook's graph for an chessboard may also be defined as the Cartesian product of two complete graphs and , expressed in a single formula as. The complement graph of a rook's graph is a crown graph.

Strong regularity

and observe that the rook's graph has all of the following properties:
As they show, except in the case, these properties uniquely characterize the rook's graph. That is, the rook's graphs are the only graphs obeying all of these properties.
When, these conditions may be abbreviated by stating that an rook's graph is a strongly regular graph with parameters
. Conversely, every strongly regular graph with these parameters must be an rook's graph, unless.
embedded on a torus. This is not a rook's graph, but is strongly regular with the same parameters as the rook's graph.
When, there is another strongly regular graph, the Shrikhande graph, with the same parameters as the rook's graph.
The Shrikhande graph obeys the same properties listed by Moon and Moser. It can be distinguished from the rook's graph in that the neighborhood of each vertex in the Shrikhande graph is connected to form a -cycle. In contrast, in the rook's graph, the neighborhood of each vertex forms two triangles, disconnected from each other. Alternatively, they may be distinguished by their clique cover numbers: the rook's graph can be covered by four cliques whereas six cliques are needed to cover the Shrikhande graph.

Symmetry

Rook's graphs are vertex-transitive and -regular; they are the only regular graphs formed from the moves of standard chess pieces in this way. When, the symmetries of the rook's graph are formed by independently permuting the rows and columns of the graph, so the automorphism group of the graph has elements. When, the graph has additional symmetries that swap the rows and columns, so the number of automorphisms is.
Any two vertices in a rook's graph are either at distance one or two from each other, according to whether they are adjacent or nonadjacent respectively. Any two nonadjacent vertices may be transformed into any other two nonadjacent vertices by a symmetry of the graph. When the rook's graph is not square, the pairs of adjacent vertices fall into two orbits of the symmetry group according to whether they are adjacent horizontally or vertically, but when the graph is square any two adjacent vertices may also be mapped into each other by a symmetry and the graph is therefore distance-transitive.
When and are relatively prime, the symmetry group of the rook's graph contains as a subgroup the cyclic group that acts by cyclically permuting the vertices; therefore, in this case, the rook's graph is a circulant graph.
Square rook's graphs are connected-homogeneous, meaning that every isomorphism between two connected induced subgraphs can be extended to an automorphism of the whole graph.

Perfection

A rook's graph can also be viewed as the line graph of a complete bipartite graph — that is, it has one vertex for each edge of, and two vertices of the rook's graph are adjacent if and only if the corresponding edges of the complete bipartite graph share a common endpoint. In this view, an edge in the complete bipartite graph from the th vertex on one side of the bipartition to the th vertex on the other side corresponds to a chessboard square with coordinates.
Any bipartite graph is a subgraph of a complete bipartite graph, and correspondingly any line graph of a bipartite graph is an induced subgraph of a rook's graph. The line graphs of bipartite graphs are perfect: in them, and in any of their induced subgraphs, the number of colors needed in any vertex coloring is the same as the number of vertices in the largest complete subgraph. Line graphs of bipartite graphs form an important family of perfect graphs: they are one of a small number of families used by to characterize the perfect graphs and to show that every graph with no odd hole and no odd antihole is perfect. In particular, rook's graphs are themselves perfect.
Because a rook's graph is perfect, the number of colors needed in any coloring of the graph is just the size of its largest clique. The cliques of a rook's graph are the subsets of its rows and columns, and the largest of these have size, so this is also the chromatic number of the graph. An -coloring of an rook's graph may be interpreted as a Latin square: it describes a way of filling the rows and columns of an grid with different values in such a way that the same value does not appear twice in any row or column. Although finding an optimal coloring of a rook's graph is straightforward, it is NP-complete to determine whether a partial coloring can be extended to a coloring of the whole graph. Equivalently, it is NP-complete to determine whether a partial Latin square can be completed to a full Latin square.

Independence

An independent set in a rook's graph is a set of vertices, no two of which belong to the same row or column of the graph; in chess terms, it corresponds to a placement of rooks no two of which attack each other. Perfect graphs may also be described as the graphs in which, in every induced subgraph, the size of the largest independent set is equal to the number of cliques in a partition of the graph's vertices into a minimum number of cliques. In a rook's graph, the sets of rows or the sets of columns form such an optimal partition. The size of the largest independent set in the graph is therefore. Every color class in every optimal coloring of a rook's graph is a maximum independent set.
Rook's graphs are well-covered graphs: every independent set in a rook's graph can be extended to a maximum independent set, and every maximal independent set in a rook's graph has the same size,.

Domination

The domination number of a graph is the minimum cardinality among all dominating sets. On the rook's graph a set of vertices is a dominating set if and only if their corresponding squares either occupy, or are a rook's move away from, all squares on the board. For the board the domination number is.
On the rook's graph a -dominating set is a set of vertices whose corresponding squares attack all other squares at least times. A -tuple dominating set on the rook's graph is a set of vertices whose corresponding squares attack all other squares at least times and are themselves attacked at least times. The minimum cardinality among all -dominating and -tuple dominating sets are the -domination number and the -tuple domination number, respectively. On the square board, and for even, the -domination number is when and. In a similar fashion, the -tuple domination number is when is odd and less than.