Searching for Smallest Universal Graphs and Tournaments with SAT

Abstract

A graph is induced k-universal if it contains all graphs of order k as an induced subgraph. For over half a century, the question of determining smallest k-universal graphs has been studied. A related question asks for a smallest k-universal tournament containing all tournaments of order k. This paper proposes and compares SAT-based methods for answering these questions exactly for small values of k. Our methods scale to values for which a generate-and-test approach isn't feasible; for instance, we show that an induced 7-universal graph has more than 16 vertices, whereas the number of all connected graphs on 16 vertices, modulo isomorphism, is a number with 23 decimal digits Our methods include static and dynamic symmetry breaking and lazy encodings, employing external subgraph isomorphism testing.