Graph Guessing Games and non-Shannon Information Inequalities

Abstract

Guessing games for directed graphs were introduced by Riis [12] for studying multiple unicast network coding problems. In a guessing game, the players toss generalised dice and can see some of the other outcomes depending on the structure of an underlying digraph. They later guess simultaneously the outcome of their own die. Their objective is to find a strategy which maximises the probability that they all guess correctly. The performance of the optimal strategy for a graph is measured by the guessing number of the digraph.

In [3], Christofides and Markstrom studied guessing numbers of undirected graphs and defined a strategy which they conjectured to be optimal. One of the main results of this paper is a disproof of this conjecture.

The main tool so far for computing guessing numbers of graphs is information theoretic inequalities. The other main result of the paper is that Shannon's information inequalities, which work particularly well for a wide range of graph classes, are not sufficient for computing the guessing number.

Finally we pose a few more interesting questions some of which we can answer and some which we leave as open problems.