The competition numbers of regular polyhedra

Abstract

The notion of a competition graph was introduced by J. E. Cohen in 1968. The competition graph C(D) of a digraph D is a (simple undirected) graph which has the same vertex set as D and has an edge between two distinct vertices x and y if and only if there exists a vertex v in D such that (x,v) and (y,v) are arcs of D. For any graph G, G together with sufficiently many new isolated vertices is the competition graph of some acyclic digraph. In 1978, F. S. Roberts defined the competition number k(G) of a graph G as the minimum number of such isolated vertices. In general, it is hard to compute the competition number k(G) for a graph G and it has been one of important research problems in the study of competition graphs to characterize a graph by computing its competition number. It is well known that there exist 5 kinds of regular polyhedra in the three dimensional Euclidean space: a tetrahedron, a hexahedron, an octahedron, a dodecahedron, and an icosahedron. We regard a polyhedron as a graph. The competition numbers of a tetrahedron, a hexahedron, an octahedron, and a dodecahedron are easily computed by using known results on competition numbers. In this paper, we focus on an icosahedron and give the exact value of the competition number of an icosahedron.