In this article about Complete coloring we will explore different aspects and perspectives about this broad and relevant topic in today's society. From its origin and evolution, to its implications in different areas of daily life, we will delve into a detailed analysis that will allow us to better understand the multiple dimensions that Complete coloring encompasses. Through research and reflection, we seek to shed light on aspects that are little known or debated, in order to enrich our understanding of Complete coloring and its implications in the contemporary world.

In graph theory, a complete coloring is a (proper) vertex coloring in which every pair of colors appears on at least one pair of adjacent vertices. Equivalently, a complete coloring is minimal in the sense that it cannot be transformed into a proper coloring with fewer colors by merging pairs of color classes. The achromatic number ψ(G) of a graph G is the maximum number of colors possible in any complete coloring of G.
A complete coloring is the opposite of a harmonious coloring, which requires every pair of colors to appear on at most one pair of adjacent vertices.
Finding ψ(G) is an optimization problem. The decision problem for complete coloring can be phrased as:
Determining the achromatic number is NP-hard; determining if it is greater than a given number is NP-complete, as shown by Yannakakis and Gavril in 1978 by transformation from the minimum maximal matching problem.[1]
Note that any coloring of a graph with the minimum number of colors must be a complete coloring, so minimizing the number of colors in a complete coloring is just a restatement of the standard graph coloring problem.
For any fixed k, it is possible to determine whether the achromatic number of a given graph is at least k, in linear time.[2]
The optimization problem permits approximation and is approximable within a approximation ratio.[3]
The NP-completeness of the achromatic number problem holds also for some special classes of graphs: bipartite graphs,[2] complements of bipartite graphs (that is, graphs having no independent set of more than two vertices),[1] cographs and interval graphs,[4] and even for trees.[5]
For complements of trees, the achromatic number can be computed in polynomial time.[6] For trees, it can be approximated to within a constant factor.[3]
The achromatic number of an n-dimensional hypercube graph is known to be proportional to , but the constant of proportionality is not known precisely.[7]