Abstract
The chromatic sum of a graph G is the smallest total among all proper colorings of G using natural numbers. It was shown that computing the chromatic sum is NP-hard. In this article we prove that a simple greedy algorithm applied to sparse graphs gives a "good" approximation of the chromatic sum. For all graphs the existence of a polynomial time algorithm that approximates the chromatic sum with a linear function error implies P = NP.
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Kubicka, E., Kubicki, G., Kountanis, D. (1991). Approximation algorithms for the chromatic sum. In: Sherwani, N.A., de Doncker, E., Kapenga, J.A. (eds) Computing in the 90's. Great Lakes CS 1989. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 507. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0038467
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0038467
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