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Covering the cliques of a graph with vertices. (English) Zbl 0766.05063
Here all graphs have order $$n$$ and isolated vertics are not counted as cliques. The central problem studied is that of estimating the cardinality $$\tau_c(G)$$ of the smallest set that shares a vertex with each clique of $$G$$. Among other results it is shown that $$\tau_c(G)\leq n-\sqrt{2n}+{3\over 2}$$ and a linear time (in the number of edges) algorithm for achieving this bound is proposed. Four associated problems are presented. For example, it is asked if $$\tau_c(G)\leq n-r(n)$$ for all graphs $$G$$ where $$r(n)$$ is the largest integer such that every triangle-free graph contains an independent set of $$r(n)$$ vertices. Also, how large triangle-free induced subgraphs does a $$K_4$$-free graph $$G$$ contain.

##### MSC:
 05C70 Edge subsets with special properties (factorization, matching, partitioning, covering and packing, etc.) 05C35 Extremal problems in graph theory 05C85 Graph algorithms (graph-theoretic aspects)
##### Keywords:
covering; cliques; linear time algorithm; triangle-free graph
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##### References:
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