Strong Ramsey Games in Unbounded Time

Abstract

For two graphs $B$ and $H$ the strong Ramsey game $\mathcal{R}(B,H)$ on the board $B$ and with target $H$ is played as follows. Two players alternately claim edges of $B$. The first player to build a copy of $H$ wins. If none of the players win, the game is declared a draw. A notorious open question of Beck asks whether the first player has a winning strategy in $\mathcal{R}(K_n,K_k)$ in bounded time as $n\rightarrow\infty$. Surprisingly, in a recent paper Hefetz et al. constructed a $5$-uniform hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ for which they proved that the first player does not have a winning strategy in $\mathcal{R}(K_n^{(5)},\mathcal{H})$ in bounded time. They naturally ask whether the same result holds for graphs. In this paper we make further progress in decreasing the rank. In our first result, we construct a graph $G$ (in fact $G=K_6\setminus K_4$) and prove that the first player does not have a winning strategy in $\mathcal{R}(K_n \sqcup K_n,G)$ in bounded time. As an application of this result we deduce our second result in which we construct a $4$-uniform hypergraph $G'$ and prove that the first player does not have a winning strategy in $\mathcal{R}(K_n^{(4)},G')$ in bounded time. This improves the result in the paper above. An equivalent formulation of our first result is that the game $\mathcal{R}(K_\omega\sqcup K_\omega,G)$ is a draw. Another reason for interest on the board $K_\omega\sqcup K_\omega$ is a folklore result that the disjoint union of two finite positional games both of which are first player wins is also a first player win. An amusing corollary of our first result is that at least one of the following two natural statements is false: (1) for every graph $H$, $\mathcal{R}(K_\omega,H)$ is a first player win; (2) for every graph $H$ if $\mathcal{R}(K_\omega,H)$ is a first player win, then $\mathcal{R}(K_\omega\sqcup K_\omega,H)$ is also a first player win.