Let @math be a fixed integer and let @math be the number of @math -colourings of the graph @math . For certain values of the average degree, the random variable @math is known to be concentrated in the sense that @math converges to @math in probability [Achlioptas and Coja-Oghlan: FOCS 2008]. In the present paper we prove a significantly stronger concentration result. Namely, we show that for a wide range of average degrees, @math converges to @math in probability for any diverging function @math . For @math exceeding a certain constant @math this result covers all average degrees up to the so-called condensation phase transition, and this is best possible. As an application, we show that the experiment of choosing a @math -colouring of the random graph @math uniformly at random is contiguous with respect to the so-called "planted model".
We expect that the present approach of combining the second moment method with small subgraph conditioning can be applied successfully to a variety of other random constraint problems. Immediate examples that spring to mind include random @math -NAESAT or random @math -XORSAT, random hypergraph @math -colourability or, more generally, the family of problems studied in @cite_19 . (On the other hand, we expect that in problems such as random @math -SAT the logarithm of the number of satisfying assignments exhibits stronger fluctuations, due to a lack of symmetry.)
@cite_19
1818081266
Many NP-complete constraint satisfaction problems appear to undergo a phase transition from solubility to insolubility when the constraint density passes through a critical threshold. In all such cases it is easy to derive upper bounds on the location of the threshold by showing that above a certain density the first moment (expectation) of the number of solutions tends to zero. We show that in the case of certain symmetric constraints, considering the second moment of the number of solutions yields nearly matching lower bounds for the location of the threshold. Specifically, we prove that the threshold for both random hypergraph 2-colorability (Property B) and random Not-All-Equal @math -SAT is @math . As a corollary, we establish that the threshold for random @math -SAT is of order @math , resolving a long-standing open problem.