Greedy coloring (nonfiction)

Two greedy colorings of the same graph using different vertex orders. The right example generalises to 2-colorable graphs with n vertices, where the greedy algorithm expends n/2 colors.

In the study of graph coloring problems in mathematics and computer science, a greedy coloring is a coloring of the vertices of a graph formed by a greedy algorithm that considers the vertices of the graph in sequence and assigns each vertex its first available color. Greedy colorings do not in general use the minimum number of colors possible. However, they have been used in mathematics as a technique for proving other results about colorings and in computer science as a heuristic to find colorings with few colors.

In the News

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  2018: Consortium of Greedy algorithms found guilty of extorting a percentage of color (the so-called "color tax") from greedy coloring algorithms worldwide.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Crimes against mathematical constants are more common than you think
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Mathematics

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Graph theory (nonfiction)
• Greedy algorithm (nonfiction)
• Mathematics (nonfiction)

== External links

• Greedy coloring @ Wikipedia