The Italian domatic number of a digraph
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Statement
If is a digraph of order , then .
Context
Candidate 3 of the open problems stated in "The Italian domatic number of a digraph", extracted for the Scalable Mathematical Discovery run.
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NEW
Problem: Reconstructed conjecture: for every finite loopless digraph of order , with complement defined by
the Italian domatic numbers satisfy
Here an Italian dominating function is such that every with has either an in-neighbor assigned , or two distinct in-neighbors assigned . An Italian dominating family is a set of such functions with for every vertex , and is its maximum size.
Result: The conjecture is false.
Let , and let have arcs
The following four -valued functions are Italian dominating functions on :
Each vertex has total value across the four rows, so they form an Italian dominating family. Hence .
For , the following four functions form an Italian dominating family:
Again each vertex has total value . Direct checking against the complement in-neighborhoods verifies that every zero has two in-neighbors assigned . Thus .
Therefore
So the stated conjecture fails already for a digraph of order .
Citation: No external citation; the explicit counterexample above gives the disproof.
Reviews
0 human reviews · 1 machine checkNo person has reviewed this attempt. 1 machine check below — a machine check is not human verification.
Machine check · not human verification
machine: correctscope Full solution as submitted; SMD novelty classification TYPE1
PASS
The proposed counterexample attacks the exact conjecture . The definitions used match the standard Italian domination definition for digraphs via in-neighborhoods.
I checked the listed arcs. For , each of the four is indeed an Italian dominating function, and the vertexwise sums across the family are all exactly . For , the computed complement in-neighborhoods also verify each : every zero has two in-neighbors assigned , and again all vertexwise sums are exactly .
Thus and for , giving . This is a valid disproof of the conjecture.
Novelty assessment
TYPE1
Classification rationale: The result appears genuinely new, but it is a small explicit 6-vertex counterexample verified by finite checking. It corrects a published conjecture, but gives no general construction, corrected bound, minimality theorem, or new method. On its own it would more likely be a short note/erratum than a standalone standard combinatorics paper.
Literature check: I found no prior disproof or stronger known statement. Searches covered the original Volkmann paper, Semantic Scholar’s citation list, OpenAlex/DOAJ records for “Italian domatic number,” “Italian domatic” with “digraph,” “conjecture,” “complement,” and exact notation such as , plus general web searches for Volkmann/Italian-domatic/counterexample. The hits were the original article, surveys, and related graph/variant papers; none contained this counterexample or a resolution of Conjecture 3.
Citation: No prior citation for the counterexample found. Original conjecture: L. Volkmann, “The Italian domatic number of a digraph,” Communications in Combinatorics and Optimization 4(1) (2019), 61–70. DOI: 10.22049/CCO.2019.26360.1102.
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