Abstract
In the online graph coloring problem, vertices from a graph G, known in advance, arrive in an online fashion and an algorithm must immediately assign a color to each incoming vertex v so that the revealed graph is properly colored. The exact location of v in the graph G is not known to the algorithm, since it sees only previously colored neighbors of v.
The online chromatic number of G is the smallest number of colors such that some online algorithm is able to properly color G for any incoming order. We prove that computing the online chromatic number of a graph is PSPACE-complete.