Antichains of Bounded Size in the Class of Tournaments

AbstractTournament embedding is an order relation on the class of finite tournaments. An antichain is a set of finite tournaments that are pairwise incomparable in this ordering. We say an antichain $$\mathcal{A}$$ can be extended to an antichain $$\mathcal{B}{\text{ if }}\mathcal{A} \subseteq \mathcal{B}$$ . Those finite antichains that can not be extended to antichains of arbitrarily large finite cardinality are exactly those that contain a member of each of four families of tournaments. We give an upper bound on the cardinality of extensions of such antichains. This bound depends on the maximum order of the tournaments in the antichain.

[1]  Brenda J. Latka,et al.  Structure theorem for tournaments omitting N5 , 2003, J. Graph Theory.

[2]  Jens Gustedt,et al.  Finiteness Theorems for Graphs and Posets Obtained by Compositions , 1998 .

[3]  Gregory L. Cherlin Combinatorial problems connected with nite homogeneity , 1992 .

[4]  Guoli Ding,et al.  Subgraphs and well-quasi-ordering , 1992, J. Graph Theory.

[5]  G. Cherlin,et al.  A Decision Problem Involving Tournaments , 1996 .

[6]  Brenda J. Latka Structure theorem for tournaments omitting N 5 , 2003 .

[7]  Bogdan Oporowski,et al.  On Infinite Antichains of Matroids , 1995, J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B.

[8]  Gregory Cherlin,et al.  Minimal Antichains in Well-founded Quasi-orders with an Application to Tournaments , 2000, J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B.

[9]  A. H. Lachlan,et al.  Countable homogeneous tournaments , 1984 .

[10]  J. W. Moon Tournaments whose Subtournaments are Irreducible or Transitive , 1979, Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.

[11]  B. Latka A Classification of Antichains of Finite Tournaments , 2002 .

[12]  Brenda J. Latka,et al.  Finitely constrained classes of homogeneous directed graphs , 1994, Journal of Symbolic Logic (JSL).

[13]  C. Ward Henson,et al.  Countable homogeneous relational structures and ℵ0-categorical theories , 1972, Journal of Symbolic Logic.

[14]  Donald E. Knuth,et al.  Axioms and Hulls , 1992, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[15]  Paul Erdös,et al.  A Problem on Tournaments , 1964, Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.

[16]  Peter J. Cameron,et al.  Orbits of Permutation Groups on Unordered Sets, II , 1978 .