Abstract
The 3-coloring of hereditary graph classes has been a deeply-researched problem in the last decade. A hereditary graph class is characterized by a (possibly infinite) list of minimal forbidden induced subgraphs H1, H2, ... ; the graphs in the class are called (H1, H2, ... )-free.
The complexity of 3-coloring is far from being understood, even for classes defined by a few small forbidden induced subgraphs. For H-free graphs, the complexity is settled for any H on up to seven vertices.
There are only two unsolved cases on eight vertices, namely 2 P4 and P8. For P8 -free graphs, some partial results are known, but to the best of our knowledge, 2P4 -free graphs have not been explored yet.
In this paper, we show that the 3-coloring problem is polynomial-time solvable on (2P4, C5) -free graphs.