Complexity of acyclic colorings of graphs and digraphs with degree and girth constraints

Abstract: We consider acyclic r-colorings in graphs and digraphs: they color the vertices in r colors, each of which induces an acyclic graph or digraph. (This includes the dichromatic number of a digraph, and the arboricity of a graph.) For any girth and sufficiently high degree, we prove the NP-completeness of acyclic r-colorings; our method also implies the known analogue for classical colorings. The proofs use high girth graphs with high arboricity and dichromatic numbers. High girth graphs and digraphs with high chromatic and dichromatic numbers have been well studied; we re-derive the results from a general result about relational systems, which also implies the similar fact about high girth and high arboricity used in the proofs. These facts concern graphs and digraphs of high girth and low degree; we contrast them by considering acyclic colorings of tournaments (which have low girth and high degree). We prove that even though acyclic two-colorability of tournaments is known to be NP-complete, random acyclically r-colorable tournaments allow recovering an acyclic r-coloring in deterministic linear time, with high probablity.