Some results on the achromatic number
Niall Cairnie, Keith J. Edwards · Journal of Graph Theory · 1997
Let G be a simple graph. The achromatic number ψ(G) is the largest number of colors possible in a proper vertex coloring of G in which each pair of colors is adjacent somewhere in G. For any positive integer m, let q(m) be the largest integer k such that ≤ m. We show that the problem of determining the achromatic number of a tree is NP-hard. We further prove that almost all trees T satisfy ψ (T) = q(m), where m is the number of edges in T. Lastly, for fixed d and ϵ > 0, we show that there is an integer N0 = N0(d, ϵ) such that if G is a graph with maximum degree at most d, and m ≥ N0 edges, then (1 - ϵ)q(m) ≤ ψ (G) ≤ q(m). © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Graph Theory 26: 129–136, 1997